The URL structure, along with other on-page SEO elements, should work to help your search engine visibility and rankings. In this post we are only going look at basic URL structure, to analyse the difference between a good URL and a bad one.

Bad URLs

Take a look at the following URL:

http://www.badurl.com/banana.asp?id=1_&category=234_1

Why is the above URL classified as bad? Well, the main issue is all those weird characters at the end.  As we all know, search engines cannot interpret characters for relevancy. That’s why it is advised to use relevant keywords in your URL, as it facilitates both search engine crawlers and human beings when it comes to navigating and understanding your site. Now let’s take a look at a good URL to see what I mean. You see the difference?

http://www.roimedia.co.za/search-engine-optimisation/

The above URL is clean, descriptive and targets specific keywords that are relevant to the page. There are no weird or funny characters. This type of URL is easily crawled and interpreted for relevancy.

Things to keep in mind when creating URLs

• Try to incorporate targeted keywords in your URL where possible
• Use hyphens/dashes as word separators
• Keep URLs short and descriptive – they will be remembered more
• Stick to lowercase letters
• Create static URLs instead of long dynamic URLs

Having a poor URL structure can result in:

• Lack of indexation by search engines
• Ranking of irrelevant keywords
• Inability for users to remember the URL

The points listed above should be kept in mind when creating or optimising URLs. There are a few other factors involved but I am keeping this very simple. If you have any to add, please do so in the comments section at the bottom of this page.

So, based on this, it’s obvious why so many webmasters become nervous, especially since the Panda update a few months ago which affected sites’ rankings based on the quality of their content and various other metrics.
So for now, it’s clear that all SEO agencies and companies alike, as well as online business owners, need to direct their attention and focus towards updating their content more frequently. Not only is this often times difficult, but it requires a lot of resources. If you find yourself to be outranked by queries from fresh and new content which you use to rank for, then you’ll obviously have to think about creating new content more often.

What Google said:

“We completed our Caffeine web indexing system last year, which allows us to crawl and index the web for fresh content quickly on an enormous scale. Building upon the momentum from Caffeine, today we’re making a significant improvement to our ranking algorithm that impacts roughly 35 percent of searches and better determines when to give you more up-to-date relevant results for these varying degrees of freshness.”

Now, if you go ahead and think of that 35 percent figure again, what I’m thinking is that, potentially, Google means to say that around 1/3 of search engine related queries involve or relate to fresh and/or updated content.

Freshness ranking is not new, just apparently improved?! So, this pretty much goes to say that 35 percent of the searches in Google are impacted by this. That is larger than the Panda update which impacted 12 percent of the searches conducted.

What type of searches does it impact? Google said:

• Recent events or hot topics.
• Regularly recurring events.
• Frequent updates.

Well here is my concern and my two cents on this situation:

Has competition and online user activity increased so much that there is not enough room for everyone to compete on only one search engine?
If this is true then that means Google obviously has to find a way to create enough virtual business and information trading space by installing a system whereby being found online and making sales comes down to how active and relevant you are.

This definitely takes the field of SEO so much further and directly creates more work for us SEO’s but, for how long and is this also not going to be responsible for creating a lot of potential spammy results through Google cause, let’s face it, it doesn’t take a genius to update your blog or website and there are numerous plugins that you can install on your blogs that pull in data from various feeds etc.

This situation will inevitably spur on software developers to create even more auto content generating tools to automatically update the content on your site. These days it seems that Google is playing the money game and potentially rigging the system to its advantage. Have a look at the posts below and make up your own minds.

Brand VS Affiliate Spam
Google enters Make Money Online Niche

Other factors that have also created concern are the fact that Google has implemented ads at the bottom of search results, (read more here) which, combined with video & image results on the first page of Google, basically means that we are now competing for the first five of the ten spots available on the first page of Google seeing that most users only click on the results in the top fold of their screen which happens to display only between four or five results unless you scroll down of course. Some of this is old news to some but for the uninformed, this stresses a huge area of concern which has pros and cons for online users from all walks of life.

Resources:

http://searchengineland.com/google-search-algorithm-change-for-freshness-to-impact-35-of-searches-99856

http://www.webpronews.com/google-algorithm-update-focuses-on-freshness-and-recency-2011-11

http://socialmediatoday.com/jamesamartin/384642/google-algorithm-update-freshness-counts-even-more-now

http://econsultancy.com/us/blog/8244-google-s-freshness-update-what-s-the-effect-on-websites

So why is a migration so important? It is important as it will ensure you do not lose the rankings your current site has when you launch your new one.

Vital Steps in a Migration
URL Redirects

Usually, when you are doing a website redesign, you will be changing your CMS. E.g. Plain HTML site to a Joomla platform. This will mean that your URL structure will most probably change. In this case you will need to perform URL redirects. This when you redirect one URL to where its new home will be on the new version of the website.

URL redirects are important for 2 reasons:

1. If you do not redirect the old URLs when you launch your new site they will all appear as broken links. Google, as well as other websites, will have references of your old URLs that users will be clicking on. A URL redirect ensures instead of a broken link, they are swiftly redirected to the new page on the website.

2. In order to maintain the rankings a page has you will need to make sure these pages are redirected to the most appropriate page on the new website. Example:

URL on old website = www.mywebsite.co.za/capetowntours
URL on new website = www.mywebsite.co.za/cape-town-tours.html

You will need to ensure the first URL – /capetowntours is redirected to the new one – /cape-town-tours.html

If a redirect does not take place, search engines will visit this old page, find a broken link and assume this page no longer exists – hence the rankings that page has will also fall away.

Migration of all SEO Elements

When performing a website redesign it is vital to ensure that the new CMS you are building it on is SEO friendly and can accommodate the SEO work that was done on the previous website.
During the building of the new site you will need to ensure that all onsite SEO elements are carried across such as metadata, h1s and content.

Not carrying this across can also lead to the site losing rankings. This is because the site was ranked for the content and SEO elements it had on it. If these are not carried across then the new site will probably not rank as well in the search engines.

It is vital that a website migration is done by SEO experts. As much as your developer can carry the information across from the old to the new website, it is essential that your SEO company steps in to ensure all SEO work is transferred to the new site, as well as ensuring all URL redirects are in place.

R.O.I. Media specializes in website migrations to ensure you don’t lose any of the rankings your site currently has. Contact us today and find out how we can help you migrate your site swiftly and safely.

According to Google itself, “97 percent of consumers search for local businesses online.” This is a staggering figure, and one which has far reaching ramifications for the marketing industry. Gone is the former concept of hit-and-miss marketing through mediums such as junk mail. The internet now allows businesses to promote their company based on the demographics and needs of their specific target market – therefore leading to higher conversions from increasingly valid traffic.

But, what is Google Places really and how can it add value to your business?

In short, Google Places allows a business to display details pertaining to its physical location and services when browsers search for related businesses on Google Maps. Input the words ‘pizza Cape Town’ and see what happens – you’ll quickly note the Google Places entries. This presents a largely untapped potential for, not only increased conversions through relevant searches, but also from carefully placed keywords. As Google Places is, naturally, a Google product the entries get priority during searches – meaning that expert keyword insertion can lead to top rankings for formally near untouchable keywords when pursuing organic methods.

According to Vic Gundotra, Vice President of Engineering for Google Maps mobile division, “more than 100 million people a month are now using Google Maps for mobile”. The rapid expansion of mobile browsing has not gone unnoticed by digital marketing experts like R.O.I. Media, and taking full advantage of this growing trend by adapting mobile compatible apps is certainly one of the top priorities going forward.

In short, your website might have been unable to rank for ‘best pizza Cape Town’, but your Google Places entry just may. While it’s true that Google Places only allows a brief entry in terms of actual information, it’s also true that interested browsers are able to connect to your business site easily enough should they want additional details. The idea here is to catch their attention quickly and direct them to your establishment, rather than leaving quality conversions to your competitors.

Separating fact from fiction

R.O.I. managing director Allen Jaffe is no stranger to optimisation advancements. Recognised as one of the foremost search engine optimisation (SEO) experts in the global market today, Allen has his finger on the pulse in terms of both currently accepted and contentious advancements within the industry.

“Google has the majority market share with more than 12 billion searches per month, and we’re not likely to see a dip there. Google Places is currently providing results and making companies easily accessible with great summarised reviews” says the R.O.I. founder. “It’s still a controversial topic at this point, but Google Places is consuming organic real estate, and the entries are placed in a highly strategic location. Google is constantly evolving and the latest evidence of this is the Places product, which is providing local listings to great effect.”

“There’s no doubt that Google Places will usurp rankings from organic SEO, and R.O.I. will always evolve with the landscape of search techniques. Another pivotal detail is that 67 percent of Google’s searches on weekends are done via mobile devices, and Google Maps and Google Places have evolved to take advantage of that fact. I’m proud to announce that R.O.I. will now be offering a single free listing as a value added service to all new and existing clients.”

Allen went on to say that the Google product would become another aspect of the company’s overall SEO strategy.

As a client of R.O.I., if you’re interested in taking advantage of the product’s enticing mobile search viability as well as coupon generation, reviews, location details, images and ranking boosts – contact your Account Manager today.

These are some of the most painful questions asked by many website business owners and although we can completely sympathise with their concerns, it is not uncommon to find that sometimes they are not happy with the answers!

The truth is that the solutions to these problems often look easy on paper but implementing them is another matter entirely. Progress is most often hindered when the onsite implementation of action points can only be done by a third party web-development company.

So what are the biggest loopholes and reasons why website links and juice are lost, diluted or completely blocked from being indexed?

• Links based in JavaScript, Flash or Plug-Ins – Links embedded inside these elements are almost always inaccessible to spiders.
• Overly complex URLs ( e.g. five or more parameters in the query string)
• Session ID’s or user ID’s in the URL
• Temporary 302 Re-directs – This type of re-direct does not pass any link juice whatsoever.
• Links in submission forms – Some forms have certain elements like drop down menus and other complicated elements, like surveys, which make it very difficult for spiders to index.
• Links in internal search boxes – Spiders don’t perform searches to get content and this can result in thousands of pages on the web being completely inaccessible due to being hidden behind internal search box walls.
• Links in frames and I-Frames – these elements present complex structural problems for search engines.
• Links on dedicated pages with thousands of links – On average, the limit for search engines is 150 links per page, so this obviously causes some concerns. Preserve your link juice by using the rel=”nofollow” tag for the less important links and leave the high priority links to pass on link juice to the other pages of your site.
• Links to pages that are blocked by the commands in the Robots.txt file – Robots.txt files allow the webmaster to control and restrict spider access to certain pages that you don’t want to be indexed. Use this effectively to preserve your domain authority.
• Duplication and canonicalisation – Having more than one dedicated URL (e.g.; http://www.example.com/index.html, http://www.example.com/default.aspx etc…) for your site dilutes the amount of link authority and therefore dilutes the overall link juice that could be passed to your ideal domain URL – e.g.; http://www.example.com/
• Static and XML sitemaps – Not implementing these correctly could lead to valuable pages on your site not being indexed and therefore not contributing to the overall domain authority.

The first step in resolving these issues would be to identify the problems and then fix them. Ideally the best practice would be to keep these factors in mind when building your site up from scratch. When it comes to building a brand new site it is best to start out by creating a strong focus on architecture and linking structure. One of the best and most advised site structures, which can preserve both a strong information hierarchy and link structure, is  called a “stacked pyramids structure” as you can see from the image below.

Unfortunately most of us aren’t so lucky and only find these types of problems after the site has been built and running for a while. Lucky for us there is a little tool that is free to use and available to everyone: Google Webmaster Tools.

Google Webmaster Tools allows access to a wonderful variety of tools to troubleshoot the above mentioned problems. Once you have your site verified, navigate your way to the Crawl Errors Report.

The Crawl Errors Report is one of the most helpful tools and one of the primary reasons why Google Webmaster Tools is so helpful. Using this report will allow you to see which of your pages are giving errors and why, as well as solutions to your problems via the Webmasters Help Centre.

Use Google’s Webmaster Tools to spot loopholes that are preventing your site pages and keywords from ranking in the search engines and by doing so, you will successfully manage to preserve as much of your website’s authority and link juice.

This is done now and will not be rolled back and long tail searches are now serving higher quality sites in the SERP’s. But, this post isn’t just about the Mayday occurrence, I simply wanted to illustrate that, if Google is still making such huge changes to its algorithm (which involve content evaluation) you should always be analysing your content reports within Google Analytics. Your content might be screaming out for help and you would not even know it. You need to go and actually “listen” to what it is trying to tell you. I will be touching on a few helpful elements, which I always look out for in these content reports.

Top Content Report

The Top Content report is based on PageViews (PV) and basically showcases which of your pages are the most popular. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, a PV is registered every time a browser / user loads a page. One user can therefore register multiple PV’s on any given page. This actually says it all.  If a user decides to view a single page multiple times, you can be assured that they are finding the page quite interesting. Sometimes we think a particular page we worked on really hard will be extremely popular, but then it is not and a page which you put little effort into outperforms this page. This is vital feedback which you should be analysing to ensure you are focusing your content efforts in an area which will bring about tangible rewards.

Top Exit Pages Report

In this report I will always check whether the ‘contact us’ page and ‘thank you’ pages are within the top five (ideal) or top 10. If they are not, you should be highly concerned. The reasoning behind this is that if a very low number of people exit from these pages, you can be assured that your content pages are not enticing enough for users to be satisfied. Users will generally scan through your site and see what you have to offer by reading your content, and if they like what they see (conversion elements obviously also play a part) and read they will most likely want to contact you through your ‘contact us’ mediums. They will go off a satisfied user and it’ll be up to you to entice them some more.

Top Landing Pages Report

If you would like users to find you through search, which I sincerely hope you do, you should be very interested in this report. This report will mostly show which users landed directly on any given page on your website from Search Engines. Here, in most cases, you will find your homepage as the most dominant landing page but, if you are seeing a substantial amount of visitors landing on your homepage alone the you could have a problem. It’s likely that you either have very few pages on your site, your site structure might be at fault or your online marketing efforts are not gaining momentum. You need to see a good spread of pages here, and the pages which you are focusing on the most (or your main services / products) in your online marketing efforts should be your  top performing pages. If they are not then you need to relook your strategies, or you will need to raise some serious questions with your online marketing firm.

I believe unique, well written copy will always form a massive part I.T.O – Google’s ranking factors. You should, therefore, analyse your content reports on a regular basis and continue to place a great deal of your resources into creating outstanding content.

The harsh reality is that this is never easy when it comes to building and designing websites that need to convert. Some of the common reasons are that it usually comes down to user behaviour and trends, and like the moods of all women, this is unpredictable and can change at any second. 

Here are a few enlightening ideas to help with taming this 500 pound gorilla.

Heat Map Software - Of course there are a few tools that you can use, like heat mapping software, which lets you see where most of the clicking activity takes place on your site, try some of these:

• http://www.crazyegg.com/
• http://www.clickdensity.com/
• http://www.labescape.com/
• http://www.fusioncharts.com/powercharts/charts/heat-map/
• http://www.virante.com/analytics/heat-mapping
• http://www.feng-gui.com/
• http://www.hitmap.com/
• http://www.clicktale.com/

Google Analytics – This is so useful that entire books could be written about how to use this advanced website tracking software platform. If you are not using this already, then you’re either a newbie internet marketer or a complete idiot.  Try some of these ideas:

• Set up some goal funnels within analytics to track and see where users are entering and exiting your website throughout the purchase process. Take note of which exit pages have the highest exit rates, and optimise them immediately by using tricks like “Calls-to-Action”, “easy sign up forms”, better content, and high quality “Trust branding”.
• See which pages keywords are driving the most traffic to your site and also to which pages. Armed with this info you can change your tactics and re-design those specific pages that are already receiving high amounts of traffic.
• Dig a little bit deeper and find which areas, countries and cities your biggest fans and visitors come from. Knowing this allows you to shift your focus on your customer demographics to better target your products to those areas, cities and countries.

Google Adwords/PPC – Also not something to miss in your arsenal for making sales online. If you don’t know what this is, then you definitely need to talk to one of our consultants or you need to find yourself an updated version of “PPC/Adwords for Dummies” – because you’ve got a lot of catching up to do. Try some of the following on for size:

• Use your AdGroup themes to set up your landing pages. When you’re using AdGroups, you’re already testing ad copy to see which ads and keywords work best, so why not use this information to optimise your conversions campaign.
• See which AdGroups convert best and export these. Design your new landing pages using the top 3 keywords per AdGroup that have the highest search volume (plug them in here to find your search volumes). Begin creating onsite copy for these landing pages using only these keywords while keeping the use of standard conversion basics in mind, like, opt-in forms, trust branding, etc…

Headlines – This is probably one of the most important focus points of your landing page so make it count and – try not to use any old and tasteless approaches like: “Hello, and Welcome to my Site Blah Blah Blah”. Get creative and get ideas by seeing what the best of the best in your niche are already doing and using. You can also use your Google’s Adwords Title Snippets, which you use for your PPC Ads that appear on the search listings in Google, as an indicator on which types of headlines work best.

Benefits- Emphasise these in a list format in the order of your product’s “value hierarchy” to your target market. Bullet points work well and make it easy for people to consume this type of information.

Testimonials – Consumer trust is so important – I can’t stress this point enough. If and where you can, try to use live testimonials recorded in video format and upload them onto your site via YouTube. Some of the biggest players are doing this very successfully. Alternatively, use quality images of your customer’s faces with relevant and clickable links, combined with their valued statement about your company. The more you can get from your customers, the better for your conversions.

In the end you need to take serious note that once you’ve set up a conversion campaign, you need to look at it, study it, and constantly tweak and re-asses your strategies from time to time. If this is too time consuming for you, then you need to consider another career, job, or business model. Keeping on top of this is not easy, but you only need to strike gold once to feel that the payoff was worth every second you spent.

Here are some very useful resources to peruse at your own leisure, and be sure to make notes and follow through:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/heat-map-tracking-do-you-feel-the-heat
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_map
http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/increase-landing-page-conversion-rates
http://www.conversion-rate-experts.com/articles/101-google-website-optimizer-tips/
http://www.bplans.com/business_calculators/
https://gomockingbird.com/
http://searchengineland.com/how-to-build-multi-purpose-landing-pages-for-small-budget-advertising-84997

If you have an e-commerce site you’ll agree – receiving 500 visitors or 5000 is irrelevant – the most satisfying scenario will be the one which brings about the highest profit margin. It is thus vital that you review your Google Analytics data and shift your focus accordingly. By doing this, you can substantially increase your organic revenue generation.Reviewing certain elements in your Google Analytics account can help you make informed decisions around your online marketing efforts and you’re likely to be surprised by the outcome if the correct set of data is analysed.

Here’s my list of the Top 5 elements which should be analysed in order to ‘swing the bling’ your way organically…
*Keep in mind that feasible analysis can only be conducted if you have Google Analytics installed on your site for at least six months. You also need to have the correct e-commerce and goal tracking installed.

1. Top Profit Generating Keywords:
Determining which organic keywords drove traffic to your site and which of them have CONSISTENTLY converted over a long period of time will give you great insight into which keywords you should focus on in your online marketing efforts. The reason why I screamed out CONSISTENTLY is because some keywords might have only had a conversion spike for one day. You should make sure that the keywords performed consistently over a given period so that you know whether they are feasible to hunt down.

2. Top Profit Generating Pages
Check which of your pages are generating the most income and concentrate on making them more powerful, as this will surely drive more revenue your way. You’ll also see which of your main target pages are underperforming in terms of revenue generation so that you can improve them and bring them up to par with the rest of the site. The metric Google Analytics uses to calculate the profitability of pages is referred to as the property index ($index).

3. Top Profit Generating Geo Locations
Why focus your SEO efforts on ‘Kazakhstan’ when all they are “purchasing” on your website is bandwidth? Find out which region and cities are spending the most money on your site and concentrate on getting more visitors from that area. This way you will ensure that you attract legitimate money spenders which will drastically increase your conversion rate.

4. Top Internal Search Queries
If a user searches a general keyword, like ‘health supplements’, then lands on your site and uses your internal search box to find ‘Bach Rescue Remedy’ before moving on to convert, your organic keyword report in Google Analytics will accredit the conversion to ‘health supplements’ and not the actual phrase which brought in the money. These ‘internal searchers’ will essentially be invisible to you. It is thus extremely useful to activate the internal search function in order for you to have access to an additional report in Google Analytics which will outline what keywords were searched for on your site coupled with conversion rates for all the keywords.

5. Analyse your PPC Campaigns
This only applies if you are making use of paid advertising and if you have successfully linked your AdWords and Google Analytics accounts. Sure, you can get this data from your AdWords account but I always enjoy looking at the data through Google Analytics so that I can view both paid and organic conversion rates side by side. It is always interesting to see how the two differ and more importantly, it will allow you to see where you should tweak your organic efforts in order to pounce on the successes you are receiving through pay per click.

Fusing your Google Analytics analysis with your SEO efforts in today’s ever increasing struggle for organic domination is vital and will surely give you the edge over your competitors. It is important to remember though, that analysing the above without having a well structured roll-out plan is pointless. Without a solid plan you’ll simply be wasting time and resources – it could even be the cause of your competitors overtaking you and leaving you behind to choke on their cyber-dust.

At first I thought, let me fish a little deeper but I knew that results were looking good so I decided: what’s the worst that could happen? I hate going unarmed to meetings so I decided to lower the risk slightly and get the team to put together a complete campaign report to date. As the campaign had only been running three months, it was pretty much in the infancy stages but results were already on the UP!

So I arrived at the meeting, not nervous but more excited to hear what the CEO wanted to chat about. We got through the introductions and he shot straight to the chase: “If we are paying the development company money to manage our website, why do we need you to increase our website traffic? What are you guys actually doing each month?”

After being in the industry for some time, I have really come to love these questions as I have learnt how to respond in a pretty effective manner. It is even more challenging when you are asked that question by a 50+ year old CEO who just started using the internet. The reality is that the generations of our parents and grandparents are different to ours; when they pay for a service they expect to immediately see the direct result. SEO doesn’t deliver direct results; it takes months and even years to see the right returns from your marketing spend. However, when you do see positive returns it can often be exponential and far greater than the returns received from traditional forms of marketing.

When speaking to the ‘older’ generation, the great challenge is explaining a highly technical service in a non-technical manner. In other words, you need to break it down into a language that your grandparents can understand. The best way to do this is by using an analogy that you are comfortable with.

From experience, simply presenting the results of the campaign doesn’t solve the problem. Not every client will be ‘sold’ on the results alone. They want to understand what you are doing, how much time is being allocated to these tasks and why they are being done. This is more than reasonable, as I would want to know the same thing if I was in their position.

In order to get off the right footing I decided to start by presenting the results – Organic traffic was up by 75%, keyword growth about the same and over the three months we grew their monthly enquiries by almost a 100%. This site had been in existence for many years, so we weren’t starting from a zero base; i.e. the results were pretty incredible. As expected, the CEO then said: “ok this is great to see and we are happy with the results but I need to know what is it you are actually doing on a monthly basis so that I can justify this spend to the rest of the board.”

Firstly, let me say that Search Engine Optimisation is not a great definition. We don’t optimise the search engines – that is what Google and Bing do. We optimise websites so that they are able to achieve rankings in the search engines. A far better definition for what we do would be ‘Website Optimisation’.

Here is one of my favourite analogies when selling or explaining SEO. If I say to a CEO, SEO is the combination of onsite SEO, offsite SEO and a few other online variables do you think they will understand what I am saying? Yet, if I say that onsite SEO can be compared to the early stages of a presidential election and offsite SEO compares to the latter stages, then a clearer picture starts to appear.

I then go further and elaborate…Your website is the presidential candidate running for office and at the beginning of the campaign (onsite SEO), we need to define what message he or she wants to get across to the public. We therefore ensure that your website has all the right content on it so that people understand the message being communicated. In an age in which there is serious competition in the market, we must bolster the readability of your website so that it stands out from the rest of the crowd. This entails optimising your website so that the search engines pick up the right information in the most effective manner. Once we have achieved this, we have laid down a solid foundation for the rest of the campaign.

Step 2: make sure the candidate wins the election. How? Get as many votes as possible. As your website is simply one candidate in a million, we need other sites to ‘vote’ for your website so that it becomes more popular and moves all the way up to the top of the search engines.

How do we get votes? We tell all the other relevant and credible websites out there that your website will be of interest to them as it contains good quality content/products/services, and will be of value to their readers. Once these sites see the value and realise that it will be worthwhile for their readers to visit your site, they will link to your website. Each link is therefore seen as a vote and the search engines count the links coming into to your site as votes. These days the quality of the links are far more important than the quantity and you therefore want popular websites to link to you as their popularity will rub off.

Once you have translated SEO into an easily understandable story, you can get into the details of what is being delivered on a monthly basis. Show all the set of tasks that are involved in the setup and monthly process. You can even show how many hours are assigned to link building and report to clients on how links get built each month. This will quickly translate into a happier client as they can see the physical work that has been invested towards their SEO Campaign.

Choosing the right CMS system is vital not only for the success of your website but also to ensure you do not end up forking out lots on money on web development. Luckily nowadays there are different types of CMS systems to suit both your budget and the type of website you would like to build.

When it comes to SEO compatibility my two favourite CMS’s are Joomla and WordPress. Joomla is probably the most well known CMS system for people who are looking to build a low maintenance website that is easy to run. WordPress was originally known as only a blogging platform. Nowadays more and more people are using WordPress to build professional and easy to maintain websites. In fact you would be surprised what can now be done in WordPress.

In terms of SEO, both CMS systems have their pros and cons. So how do you decide which CMS system is best for your website?

1. Budget

Your budget is probably one of the most important factors when it comes to deciding how to build your website. For those with a smaller budget who still want a solid CMS system I would suggest WordPress. There are so many amazing premium wordpress themes these days which make building your website quick, easy and less labour intensive. WordPress is also an ideal CMS solution for small businesses that want a clean design and small site to showcase their services and products. If you are a bigger company with a bigger budget then I would recommend Joomla. The Joomla CMS system is designed to work with larger sites and is also popular for e-commerce sites, due to the wide range of shopping cart modules available. WordPress has also started to offer plugins to enable sites to start running e-commerce. Joomla, however, generally provides more customization options.

2. Size

If you are a small business which just wants a nice, easy to use website I would suggest WordPress. I like to see WordPress as a quick and easy publishing tool. Not only can you setup all your company pages like the About Us, Services, Products etc but you already have a built in blog at your disposal. With the rise of social media it is vital that all companies make use of these social channels to interact with their customers. A company blog is a great way to do that. Choosing to build your site in WordPress means you already have blog functionality in place. With Joomla you will need to purchase a separate blog component in order to have the same kind of functionality as a WordPress blog.

Companies that have a lot of products, or want to offer e-commerce, are probably better off using Joomla. Joomla is a full-on CMS, with the ability to do a lot of customizations. It works very well as an e-commerce system and many sites make use of it to run their online stores. With components like Virtuemart, setting up your shopping cart is easy and you can also update your product in a quick and straightforward manner. Joomla is also the best choice for websites with multiple menus and subcategories. The menu manager in Joomla is easy to use and lets you add multiple menus across your template. WordPress works better for small sites with a simpler navigation structure.

3. SEO

In terms of SEO both CMS systems do a good job. WordPress has a few SEO plugin options available. My favourites are the All in One SEO Pack and Wordpress SEO by Yoast. The WordPress SEO plugin is relatively new but, for me, it is the most complete SEO plugin around. This plugin enables you to add unique meta data per page, configure your robots.txt, sort out URL structure and setup your sitemaps. All of these elements are important when optimising your site for the search engine. The plugin is easy to install and very easy to configure.

Joomla’s best SEO plugin is the SH404SEF. This module allows you to run all of your SEO updates in one place and this includes meta data as well as URL rewrites. Before you can switch on this plugin you will need to configure your .htaccess which can be a little tricky if you are not sure how it works. SH404SEF can also have conflicts with custom components on your website which will cause it to break the site. It’s also possible to have issues with e-commerce shopping carts and SH404SEF. Once you configure it correctly, however, this module is a great way to ensure that you have unique meta data on all of your pages and that your URL structure is clean.

In conclusion, there are pros and cons for both WordPress and Joomla. My viewpoint, however, is that, if it can be done in WordPress, then go with WordPress. Not only will you save time and money but you will have a clean, easy to manage site that can also include a blog and other social media plugins.

If your site is too complex to be built in WordPress then Joomla is definitely the way forward. If you have a specific design you are after, and don’t want to be too bound by a template, then Joomla is a good solution for you. Many people start off with a Photoshop PSD file and then start translating it into a Joomla template in order to have a unique design.

For SEO onsite optimisation for either your WordPress or Joomla site contact us today and let us help you take your business to the next level!