bcToolkit have been using Ackura SiteManager CMS and we have seen some fantastic results in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) for our primary keywords “Basecamp Reports” and “Basecamp Reporting Tools”.
I have highlights a couple of tips below that might help you increase your visibility in the SERPS.
On-site SEO Tips
Page Title Tags
A Title tag is the line of text that is normally displayed at the top of the browser window and from the search engines point of view, the title tag is the most important on page ranking factor. It essentially tells the search engines what you page is about and therefore what keywords and phrases you wish to be ranked for.
Like most Content Management Systems, Ackura SiteManager will automatically default the page name as the page Title Tag, so if your page is named “Home” this is what will appear as the tag. However, if you open the “Properties” tab you will find a field at the bottom called “Title” (see fig1) simply add your primary keywords into this field, separated by a pipe bar and save.
You page title will now be keyword rich.
fig 1
Keywords in H Tags
After the Title Tag, the second most important tag is the H1 tag (or Header Tag). This should only appear once on any given page, and ideally contain your primary keyword. You may find that in some instances the H1 tag defaults to the name of your website, this is fine for the Home page, but on internal pages it should represent the primary product or function of the page. After this the H2 tag should be used to identify sub sections of the page, with the H3 tag further breaking down these sub section (and so on up to H6)
The Header tags give the search engines a clear structure to follow as they index your site and by including a variation of your keywords at each stage you increase the chances of the search engines ranking you for these terms (see fig 2)
fig 2
Off-site SEO Tips
XML Site map
An XML Sitemap is a simple way to tell the Search Engines about new pages on your site. This is particularly useful when a site is new, particularly when submitted to the Google, Yahoo or Bing through their webmaster tool interfaces. If you wish to discover what new pages have been successfully crawled and indexed by the search engines, simply type site:www.bctoolkit.com into the Google search bar and your will be returned a list of your website’s indexed pages.
301 redirects
If you have built a new site within Ackura SiteManager (or any other new CMS system) if might be required to re-direct some of the url’s that have been indexed from the old site. It might note always be possible to keep exactly the same url string for a particular page, and if this url has a good ranking within the search engines it is a good idea to try and pass these ranking factors onto a new page of your site. The best way to do this is via a 301 redirect as this will pass on 99% of the ranking power. You can discover which pages need redirecting by using either the site:www.bctoolkit.com technique highlighted above, to see what url’s the search engines are ranking and which ones will not transfer over to the new site, or by submitting your site to Google Webmaster Tools the interface will supply you with a list of url’s that need redirecting as and when the search engine discovers them.
