Need a good looking website but you don’t have time to learn how to create your own one, and you’re on a tight budget? Don’t know too much about on-page SEO, except that its important? While this used to be a real problem, we’ve got a great solution for you.

We have developed easyCMSlite, the free, easy content management system. easyCMSlite is, as its name implies, a lite content management system. That is, lite, yet powerful. We’ve tried hard to take away the complexities of so many of the CMS systems available. I personally have tried using some of them, and I couldn’t fathom them. I am a web / software developer, so I can’t imagine what it must be like for non technical users.

easyCMSlite avoids that. For instance, to add a new page, you don’t need to be in some admin menu where you add text to a list. In easyCMSlite, you are in the actual web page, and when you want to add a page you see it as it would appear to your users. This is termed ‘What you see is what you get’ (WYSIWYG).

Another important consideration is SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). This is the important task of optimising your website so that the search engines can find you faster and hopfully rank you higher. Most CMS do have SEO capabilities, but you need to download and install plugins for that, then you need to configure and enable them. For instance, many CMS’s allow you to install a plugin to convert the URL’s they produce to one which is search engine friendly (and human friendly). So, using a plugin, you might be able to change your url from www.yoursite.com?cat=12&subcat=6&pid=34 to www.yoursite.com/category/sometitle.php. With easyCMSlite, this is automatic. If you have a main menu item called ‘Products’ and a product page you are linking to called ‘widget’, then your URL will be www.yoursite.com/products/widget.php. This is automatic and requires no plugins or configuration.

easyCMSlite has an easy to use text editor, very similar to word and excel. In fact, you should be able to copy and paste most content from word or excel into this editor, making  it even easier to manage your site.

To give easyCMSlite.com a try, go to easyCMSlite.com, the free, easy content management system, or go to www.demoserver.co.za to test the CMS in a live test environment. The username is [email protected] and the password is demo.

This is a quick note about alt tags.

Please see this article for more info: Can google see your website?

The reason I’m writing this again is because of its importance, but more importantly because of how many people do not do this.

Imagine you’re sitting in a movie theather, 60 / 70 years ago. Movies have not yet advanced to a stage where there is sound, so its a silent movie. Not very nice hey? And to make matters worse, you’ve brought your blind friend with you.

So, what has this got to do with the search engines. Well, you need to think of your website as an old fashioned movie with no sound. And you need to think of Google as your blind friend. He can’t see anything, and, as there is no sound in the movie, he can’t hear anything. Besides the pop corn, its really a waste. He needs to read braille.

Images on your website are like that silent movie. Google, being blind, needs the braille of the web, that is, it needs plain text! If you have a website with loads of images that look really great to visitors, remember, your blind friend google can’t read them (or the other search engines).

So, what should you do? Provide Alt text in images.

Here is an INCORRECT image tag <img src=”someimage.jpg”>.

Here is a CORRECT image tag <img src=”someimage.jpg” alt=”Yay, google can read this!”>

Ok, so, a demonstration is in order. Now, lets see an example, then you can rush off and try this on your own site. We are going to work with three php files:

1) image_noalt.php which has only an image as the main body. This image has NO alt text. So, this page is very bad and google can’t index it correctly. What about the meta keywords tags? Look here, google DOES NOT USE THEM, or look here! Matt Cutts is a chief engineer from Google. If I have his title incorrect, please forgive me, I don’t work there, I don’t know who gets called what, I just know that he’s a pretty important person there!

2) image_alt.php. This page has the same image, but it DOES have alt text, so google can “read” what your image is about, and can thus index it.

3) split.php. Here we have split this image. We have kept the heading as an image because we wanted the cool shadow effect (which you can probably do with some clever CSS anyway). The header image has alt text. Then, for the two smaller images, we’ve made their titles plain text, so google can index that. We’ve also added alt text to both the smaller images, so google has 5 pieces of information here.

To see what google more or less sees with these files, we’ll do a little comparison.

Below we have three examples. One is a page with NO ALT tags, and the entire page is just an image. There is a clickable link so you can see what the page looks like visually. Next to the clickable link, after the | symbol, is a link you need to copy and paste into a web browser. This will show you how google sees the page.  Do that for each of the three examples below. Note that when you copy the second link to see how google sees your page, you will notice some banners at the top. Those are advertising banners put there by that company. We are just looking at the text parts which is what google sees.

1) Normal image_noalt.php | http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.cgi?url=http://www.softsmart.co.za/blog/image_noalt.php

• Note here that the image name big_image.jpg is all that is visible to google, in terms of the main body text, not good at all

2) Normal image_alt.php | http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.cgi?url=http://www.softsmart.co.za/blog/image_alt.php

• Here there is alt text that is visible to google, so it is an improvement

3) Normal split.php | http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.cgi?url=http://www.softsmart.co.za/blog/split.php

• Here there is alt text ON EACH images, as well as plain text that is visible to google, this is the best way of making sure that google know’s what your site is about.

Conclusion

If you use image, use alt text. Always! No exceptions! If you are able to split the image up, then do that. Use plain text where possible.

Using Keywords to Improve your Search Engine Rankings

In order to be successful online you have to increase the natural search engine results for your website.
Some sources suggest that the top three natural search results on Google get more than 60% of all clicks. How far down are you in the search engine listing?

This article will be a multipart, where we will focus on specific areas of SEO.

In this, the first part article on search engine optimisation, we are going to take a look at how keywords affect your search engine rankings.

The biggest mistake you can make is using keywords that YOU think are relevant. Remember that your clientelle may not know the industry like you, so they may not know the “correct” keywords to use, but they are the ones using them, so you had better learn what they are.

If your web hosting company gives you access to log files (webalizer, awstats), then you will be able to see a list of keywords that were used to get to your site. If your web hosting company doesn’t, then its time to move your website.

An important point to remember about keyword optimisation is that you should try to focus on one (or maybe two closely related keywords) per page. In other words, Lets say in our dog grooming business we have facilities to groom big dogs, as well as little dogs, plus we sell accessories (leashes, shampoo, etc), then we should setup 3 different pages to target those categories.

Below I’m going to go through some of the keyword processes for large dogs, but the same knowledge applies to our little dogs and dog accessories pages.

Title Tag

An extremely important SEO element is the page title, ie, the <title> tag found in the header of your page. This title should be short, descriptive and well thought out. Don’t repeat words too many times and don’t write your entire site’s content into these tags.

For example, in our large dog page, my <title> tag might be <title>Large Dog Groomers | Grooming your Doberman</title>

In the example above, I’ve used groomers and grooming, two closely related keywords. Notice also that I said “Doberman”. In otherwords, depending on how popular certain breeds of dogs are in your neighbourhood, you may want to set up muliple large dog grooming pages, ie, <title>Large Dog Groomers | Grooming your German Sheppard Dog</title>,<title>Large Dog Groomers | Grooming your Rotweiler</title>.

Just be careful with this technique though. Google does penalise duplicate content, so you cannot just copy the content from one page to another. Also, and more importantly, your users are not stupid. They don’t want to go to page after page that is exactly the same content. Rather, find info specific to each breed, and include it there.

Headings (H1 Tag)

The <h1> Tag (and to a lessor extent H2, H3) tags are very important to the search engines. Just like you would see the heading of a chapter in a book as an important indication as to what the chapter is about, so google sees the H1 tag as a clue to the content of your page. Make it short and sweet, but very targetted to your keyword you are optimising for, eg, <h1>Large Breed Dog Grooming</h1>

You should consider using the <h2> or <h3> tags as subheadings for paragraphs (just as we’ve done here!).

Again, each page should use unique heading tags.

Keyworded URL

Where ever possible, you should use keywords in your URL. This is a great indication of what the page is going to be and lends alot of weight to your SERP (search engine ranking placement). So, our web address may be www.citygroomers.com. For our large breed page, we may use www.citygroomers.com/dog-grooming/large-breeds.html.

It is better to use – to seperate keywords than _. There is some debate about whether its important at all as google has become very adept at resolving largebreeds.html as two words. However, in my opinion, I still like to seperate words for the sake of less intelligent search engines, as well as for clarity. As an example, a very popular and well known IT professionals site is www.experts-exchange.com. As far as I know, they used to be called www.expertsexchange.com. However, how should google interpret this? As “experts exchange”, or as “expert sex change”? Rather different isn’t it?

Obviously a keyword in your domain name is first prize (www.dog-grooming.com), but in my opinion I feel this is less important as I’m sure google takes into account that for a given keyword, there can be only one exact domain name matching it, and it might not be the most relavant!

Meta Tags

The Meta keywords and meta content tags are less important to google, but still very important to other search engines. You may argue quite correctly that for a search engine to rely on the meta data is inferior, and we would agree. However, it is what it is and you need to decide if you’d rather put in the few minutes extra and increase your exposure, or not. Also, no-one’s saying that meta data doesn’t help at all with google.

For keywords, stick you your keywords for that page. Your content tags should be a short description (one that the search engines might display in their results).

Keyword Optimised Content

Your content is the MOST important part of on-site optimisation. As google always says, make content for users, not for search engines. It is amazing to see how often this is not the case.

So, while using your keywords is important, google WILL eventually penalise you if you over do it. They call it keyword stuffing and its just not worth it.

You should try to use your keyword as soon as possible in your body text.

As an example for our large dogs keyword, I might start my page like this:

“Grooming for large breed dogs presents a particular challange because….”

As an example of keyword stuffing (which you should not do):

“Grooming large breed dogs presents a particular challange because of large breed dogs weight. We groom large breed dogs with our specialised large breed dog grooming equipment.”

This just sounds like it was written by an illiterate. Humans don’t like it and neither do the search engines. You need to bear some facts about the search engines in mind before embarking on a keyword stuffing campaign. Google has alot of money! Google has many employees who get paid alot of money to find sites like this and to make corrections to their search algorithm, so even if it works in the short term, it WILL negatively impact you in the long term.

You should probably aim to use your keyword 3 or 4 times in the body. If it needs to be more to make it readable, then so be it, just make sure that it sounds natural.

Alt Attributes

The alt attribute is an attribute used in your image tags so that google can “read” what your image is. As you might imagine, if you have a pic with a large breed dog (a rotweiler for instance), how does google know what’s on the image? Well, they don’t. You need to tell them. That’s where the alt attribute comes in. You could use it like this <img src=”largedog.jpg” alt=”Large dog breeds”>.

All search engine spiders will now be able to apply your keyword to the weighting of the keyword within that page.

Which keywords to Use?

As I mentioned right at the top of this page, a really big challange is to determine which keywords to use.

Some problems include:

1. Rubbish keywords – You optimise for a keyword, and guess what, you’re in the search place on google for that keyword BUT you’re the only one searching for it.
2. Too broad a keyword – Your keyword is too broad, so even though your site ends up at the top, the visitors may not be interested in your content at all (for instance “large breed dogs” would probably be too broad by itself).
3. Wrong keywords. You may be optimising for keywords that your users are not using.
4. Too much competition for a given keyword

But, don’t worry, there is a great tool to use, straight from the horses mouth:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Go to google’s keyword tool. There are various methods to search, but I would recommend putting in your web address (or a specific page on your website). Google will give you a list of keywords that it thinks is relavant to your page. This is a fantastic tool. It will give you keywords as well as how many times they get searched for.

As an aside, if it gives you keywords that are completely irrelavant to your site, don’t get angry with google. Thank them that they have given you this tool because you have just identified a major flaw in your optimisation (if this is the case, maybe its best you mail us for some advice!!).

The method we use is:

Ok, so we know that SEO is more than just google, but lets face it, they are the main search engine on planet earth at this stage. SEO techniques should (in my opinion) focus heavily on google. By focusing your SEO on google, you’ll probably do pretty well with the other search engines too.

I’ll be posting many more articles about Search Engine Optimisation over time, but I wanted to raise one quick point here. Many people ask a common question, “Can google see my website?“.

Although the search engines are getting better, I think you should still be cautious of using only javascript navigation menus. You should always have a text based version of your navigation menus. This does not need to be a complete listing, but should point to category pages, which in turn can list individual links within that category. Take a look at www.softsmart.co.za to see what I mean. The main menu at the top is javascript and the bottom text based menus are not exhaustive, they lead to menu pages for that category.

Another point to note is that while making links out of images (.jpg, .gif, etc) may look great, the search engines cannot read what the images say. So, you need to have alt parameters in your img tag.

Having links that the search engines can follow will make your SEO far more effective.

So, how sure are you of your sites links? Here’s how to find out if your links are SEO friendly

1. Put a file called delorie.html into the root folder of your website (this file can be blank).
2. Go to: http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.cgi?url=http://www.yoursite.com

This will show your website in a text-based browser which is more or less how the search engines see your site. Using a text only browser you can see if your menu links are working, and you can also see if images have alt parameters. If you have an image that links to a page called “john-is-great.html” and the image is called img1.gif, then in the text browser, you will see img1.gif, not really great for SEO. If however you have <img src=”img1.gif” alt=”John is really great”>, then you will see “John is really great”.

Well, it is Christmas today, so I’ve really written this little blog very very quickly. I hope is makes sense??

Please post here to let me know if it does make sense and also to let me know if you discovered something about your site that you didn’t realise before by looking at it through the eyes of google.