SEO work you can do yourself using Webi CMS (before you contact an SEO company)

Once we have completed the development work for our clients' websites, they have populated their content and the site is ready to / has gone live - at this point most clients normally start to ask us the question "Ok great, so I've got a great new website, how do I get people to it?"

One of the big buzz words which often gets mentioned at this point is "SEO" (Search Engine Optimisation), and we often get asked from our clients and design agencies whether we offer SEO as a service.

The answer to this question is that whilst we don't offer SEO as a paid service to our clients, we do know a reasonable amount about SEO as we have worked with SEO companies and are aware of what we need to do to setup websites and program the underlying code to mean that they are setup to be search engine friendly. 

We certainly think that most if not all of our clients would benefit from contacting an SEO company, however there is so much our clients can do themselves BEFORE they contact an SEO company as there is no point in paying an SEO company at this stage as much of the below you should be able to do yourselves via Webi CMS...

So below we have put together a list of our suggested SEO elements that clients and design agencies can look at themselves first before they contact an SEO consultant:

a) In Webi CMS our clients / organisations and design agencies have the ability to add the Webpage titles, Meta description and Meta keywords for each page and its worth spending some time writing unique and relevant titles, keywords and descriptions for each page.

Its important that what you write here relates to the content on the page (rather than just shoving in keywords which don't relate to the content of the page which is such an outdated approach of doing SEO), and Google and other search engines are becoming increasingly clever with their algorithms to ensure that websites with genuine content are rightly shown higher up the search rankings.

Lastly just to mention here that the Webpage title is the single most important aspect to concentrate on getting right, particualrly on the home page and here is a specific blog entry we wrote on webpage titles which we hope will provide you with a decent starting point. 

b) Secondly once you have added all your Webpage titles, Meta description and Meta keywords to your site, our next tip is to make sure you write and add content regularly.

One of the best ways to do this is to write a weekly blog, or another way could be to add a weekly news item. Whatever new content you add, you should certainly be aiming to add one new news item / blog at least once a week as the more you can write and the more additional content you are adding on a regular basis, the more likelihood you will consistently appear higher up the search rankings. 

c) Another thing to consider is that for every link you add via the WYSIWYG to an external website page for example here to Webigence Webi CMS's parent company, you should add a special tag that tells the search engines not to follow the link – the more you have links out to other sites, the more you are weakening the search engine weighting the search engines give to your site (I’m sure there is a certain amount of leeway here and I’m not saying don’t ever allow the search engines to follow a link), as a general rule (unless you are purposefully wanting to direct traffic to another site and have that website see that you are providing them with traffic) then it’s a good idea to add this special “nofollow” tag.

You can do this in Webi CMS by going to the page where you have the links, then in the WYSIWYG editor, click on the link and then click on the ‘link’ icon in the WYSIWYG toolbar – this will open the link popup – go to the “Advanced” tab, and then for the “Relationship page to target” item, select “No Follow” from the dropdown.

d) It’s also good to have internal links (without the “nofollow” fairly obviously as you want the search engines to navigate around WITHIN your website), particularly from your blog or news items into other relevant pages of the website (but only where it will actually be meaningful and appropriate, we suggest you keep your news items high quality and meaningful rather than just trying to write just for the sake of it or just for the sake of creating internal links) – your internal links should ideally have a link from a keyword that is relevant to the page your linking to, as the link. I have done this above in a number of cases where relevant.

e) Once you have completed the above and you are wanting to take your search engine optimisation to the next level (and you are prepared to pay a significant monthly fee for the SEO company's services), then we would highly recommend you do go ahead and speak with an SEO company as they do have a lot to offer. For instance they can help you analyze keywords you should be targeting for your industry, they can look at keywords being targeted by your competitors and can work out the best keywords for you to target. They can also create content and links for you on other websites that piont back at your website and help to increase the number of quality inbound links and generally to raise your search engine profile.

Contact us when you are this point and we can then point you in the direction of an SEO company we can recommend.