Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) means the process of improving your website to increase its visibility in Google, Microsoft Bing, and other search engines, whenever people search the internet.
SEO is a highly specialised field and organisations can pay significant amounts of money for dedicated SEO optimisation resource. This guide does not aim to replicate that, however, the following tips will help to ensure that you have done everything you can within the CMS to optimise the website for SEO. These techniques will also improve the results of searches within the site (e.g. the 'sitewide' search, or Service search). For more information about how these work visit our page 'weighted search explained'.
Frank's responsibilities
When we build your website we undertake the following tasks which support SEO:
- Technical optimisation - this includes tasks such as ensuring fast loading times, making the site mobile friendly, ensuring semantic HTML mark-up is relevant (this means it clearly explains to the browser what the page template is for), ensuring it can be "crawled" (read) by search engines and structuring the data in a way that search engines understand
- Apply an SSL certificate on the site - an SSL certificate is a digital certificate that authenticates a website's identity and enables an encrypted connection. SSL certificates improve your site's SEO rankings
- Create the 'Sitemap' XML file - this allows the search engine to see the pages within your site and how they are arranged
- Index the site - this tells the search engine that the site has been updated (essentially nudges the engine to know the pages are now different)
- Other hosting and security services.
Client responsibilities
There are a number of things that you can do to improve how your site's search engine rankings. The good news is, they can be done prior to go live or afterwards. It's never too late! The following suggestions will also improve user experience and help users to find what they are looking for once on your website.
1. Keyword research
First, take some time to understand the most relevant keywords and phrases that users are searching for on your website content. You may want to talk to groups of users, or people who provide content. For example, is a particular service known by another name? Did a hospital used to be called something else? Are there alternative terms for key content (e.g. a user may search "A&E" when actually looking for a page called Emergency Department). These words will need to be included in either your content, or as keywords to the page (see accordion below).
2. On-page optimisation
This means using the CMS to ensure all the details about the page make it relevant and accessible to search engines. This is where the real work is done! Take the following steps (refer to our User Guides page for more detail on using the CMS):
How you name your pages within your website can affect both SEO and the experience of your users.
Best Practices
- Ensure the title accurately describes the page's content
- Choose a title which effectively communicates the topic of the page's content
- Create unique titles for each page
- Use brief, but descriptive titles
Avoid
- Choosing a title that has no relation to the content on the page
- Using default or vague titles like "information" or "background"
- Repeating page titles in different sections (for example, there could be a page called 'About us' which appears within many different team's sections. In search results, there may be no context therefore the user does not know what team it is referring to. Instead use a title such as 'About the Diabetes team'. If a page needs to appear in more than one place in the site, use the Alias option)
- Using extremely lengthy titles that are unhelpful to users (the search engine may only show a portion of it and it can also be deemed less relevant)
- Adding extra words or names to the title so they will be picked up in searches (instead, use a good page description, ensure the words are in the content, or add keywords)
Adding to your website
Use the 'Page Name' field in the Page Composer. You do not need to use the 'meta title' field in the SEO section of the Page Composer, our code is written for search engines to read Page Name first. If you needed search engines to read something else (for example, instead of 'Emergency Department' you wanted 'Emergency Department (A&E)' to be read in search engine results, you can use the Meta Title field. However, it can confuse users if the SEO search is very different to the page they land on. Instead, we would recommend using keywords (accordion below).
Page descriptions give additional information about the page, which will not fit into the title. They can be shown to users in search results and encourage users to click through to the site (because they know they are going to find what they are looking for), as shown in the example below:
They can also appear in the search results page of your own website, as shown in the example below:
Depending on the build of your site, they may also appear in page lists on hover, as shown in the example below:
Best practice
- Add page descriptions to all of your most important pages
- Include relevant keywords and phrases in the page description - this can help search engines understand the content of the page and how relevant it is to a users' query. It will also make the page appear higher up in the sitewide search results on the site as the CMS' weighted search prioritises based on page title first, page description second and then page content
- Accurately and concisely describe the content of the page
- Use unique page descriptions for each page
Avoid
- Writing a description that does not describe the content on the page
- Using generic descriptions like "this is a web page"
- Filling the description with only keywords - use full sentences
- Writing page descriptions that are too long
Adding to your website
To add a page description go to the 'Page Composer' and enter it into the 'Description' field as shown in the image below. As with the Page Name, you do not need to add it into the 'Meta Description' field in the SEO section of the Page Composer as search engines will read the Description field first.
Create high-quality, engaging, and relevant content that addresses the needs and interests of your target audience and attracts natural links and social shares. Content should be naturally engaging and not overly wordy.
You do not need to do any "tricks" such as adding unnecessary keywords aimed at search engines, or deceptively hiding text from users but displaying it to search engines. Instead, prioritise the user and what they are interested in, or looking for. It can be helpful to use variations of your main keyword however.
Ensure that videos, podcasts and infographics have some text description on the page, as Google doesn't know what their content is. This is also important for accessibility.
Headings
Use structured paragraphs which will help create a hierarchical structure for your content, making it easier for users to navigate through your document. This will also help with accessibility - see the Heading section of our accessible content guide for more information.
For more information you can also visit our Content Guide page.
Avoid
- Duplicate content - try to use alias pages or redirects rather than copying similar content in more than one place
- Reusing content from other websites (SEO trawlers will look for unique content)
- Overly wordy content - use bullet points and subheadings
The keywords tag used to be a popular tag that was used to provide a list of keywords for a web page. However, it is no longer used by most search engines as a ranking factor, or is heavily less valued. Instead, searches prioritise the words in the page name, description and content.
Keywords are important though if you want your users to find a page if they are using alternative terms. For example, if a service or hospital used to be known by a different name which you do not want to appear on the page itself, but you know people will use it to search. This applies to internal sitewide searches as well as search engines. For example, your page could be called Emergency Department, but you want it to appear when users search "A&E" on your site.
Adding to your site
- To add key words, go to the 'Page Composer' and select the 'Attributes' section from the menu on the left hand side
- Scroll down until you see the 'Tags' field on the left (or use the search bar at the top)
- Add your keywords and click 'Add' as shown in the image below
Older sites
For some older sites, the internal searches (e.g. site wide search of Service search) do not listen to the 'Tags' attribute. Instead they use 'Meta keywords' underneath 'SEO'. Please contact Support and we can investigate if you are not sure.
3. Navigation
Try to make sure your site map is laid out in a way that reduces large number of 'click throughs'. Ensure that your most important pages can be reached easily. Ideally this should be a maximum of 3 clicks, this is a 'flat structure'.
Try to keep the site structure simple, and scalable (e.g. you can easily add new sections without making the navigation deeper or more complicated). Group related information into topics with easy to follow navigation within that section.
Avoid
- Complicated urls
- A site structure which means important content is more than three clicks away from the homepage (a 'deep structure')
- A site structure that is disorganised
- 'Orphan' pages - e.g. pages that don't have any internal links pointing to them, they aren't in a section