In the past 15 years, since the Internet went mainstream, websites have been contstructed in various different ways. In the early days they had to be hand-written in HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). This code is not understood to the common eye, but when loaded into a browser, like Firefox or Internet Explorer, it is displayed as a fully legible web page with images and text.

Next came a string of webpage editors, like Dreamweaver and Microsoft Frontpage. These enabled us to generate webpages, and whole websites offline in a WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) user interface, and then publish them online via FTP (File Transfer Protocol).

At the same time, web design companies set about developing their own CMS (Content management systems). These are database programs on the webserver which store all the images and text in a database and then pull on it as required when a page loads. It was quickly discovered that this is a more efficient way of building multi-page websites with a uniformed theme, so that new pages can be created and displayed quickly without copying and pasting the branding and header images from others.

A battle then ensued between web design companies for the most efficient and user-friendly CMS. When a client had its site built by one of these web companies, it found itself bound into the CMS and often limited by its functionality. So, although it could log in and edit its own content and images, it often found it didn’t have the expertise to do so. Similarly, some of the CMS’s created by these web designers came with little or no documentation, so only the supplier itself could perform web updates – at a fee.

In the past seven years we have seen significant development and growth of open source CMS platforms like Drupal, Joomla and WordPress. Each of them have their pros and cons, but one in particular has begun to outshine the others in demand, and is fast becoming the equivalent of MS Word in the CMS space. It is WordPress.

When migrating a website to a new platform, web masters are looking for a solution which is not only easy to edit and update, but also one which works hand-in-glove with Google. This has become increasingly important as web developers’ experience and understanding of Google’s search algorythm has improved. It has come to light that there are some CMS’ which Google is prone to demote in its search listings, for example. It may never admit it, but sites written and hosted on Windows servers and running Microsoft software are likely to be ranked lower in Google’s results than those which have no apparent support from Google’s arch rival.

For as long as it has 80% of all search traffic worldwide, this will be an important consideration for webmasters choosing a new platform.

Opensource CMS platforms are clearly favoured by Google, and so the choice is between three: WordPress, Drupal and Joomla.

If you would like some advice migrating your website to an open source platform, we are perfectly placed to provide impartial and expert consultation in this area. Please complete the form below:

WordPress, Joomla or Drupal?

Migrating a static site to a CMS, or switching from a custom CMS to open source can bring significant advantages. It helps to have a bit of background about the choices available, so in this article we are comparing the benefits of the three most popular open source CMS platforms, WordPress, Joomla and Drupal.

Each of these three open source platforms have evolved and come of age in the past five years or so. There are two concepts which are common to all of them:

Content database: All content is written and edited in an admin-only area, behind password protection. Content can be stored as pending until such time as it needs to go live. When it is published, the website pulls the content, and any images, forms etc. from the database and places them on the page according to your chosen layout.

Plugins / extensions:  Additional functionality is added to your website by way of plugin software. These are codes and scripts which can be uploaded and installed. When activated they provide new processes and methods which are not available in the base installation of the CMS. Example plugins (extensions in Joomla) are things such as forms – for collecting visitor-entered data; SEO tools – for organising your content and making it more digestible to search engines; and Social Media icons – for placing icon links to your facebook, twitter or linked-in pages. 

There are thousands of plugins available. WordPress has the largest library and it has been said that anything you want to do with your website can be done by configuring a combination of one or more plugins from the WordPress plugin library.

Themes / look-and-feel:  Like plugins, themes are uploaded, installed and activated on a CMS website to give it a unique, or branded look and feel. The theme controls aspects such as the background colour, the page width, the typeface and paragraph defaults and the sidebars. Like plugins, each of these open source CMS’ has thousands of themes available for free in its theme library. As the most popular however, WordPress has the most.

Given that each of these CMS’s are based around these three concepts, you can then base a decision on which one to chose using known factors such as what you want your site to do. Do you want a website which collects visitor details, for example. Do you want it to find new custom for your business, or merely nurture your existing client base?  Do you want a website you will update daily, weekly or monthly? and how will you want to handle images – do you have a large image library?

Questions like these are among the deciding factors when it comes to choosing the right CMS. With over 50% of the CMS market, we usually see WordPress is the strongest contender. Most often our decision hangs on whether there are any good reasons not to use WordPress.

Are you considering CMS migration? – let us quote for it:

Then came the battle of the Content Management System (CMS). Web consultant firms all over the world became joined in a race to develop the winning solution for administering and managing websites. For a while they were onto a winning business model, for as long as they developed something their clients could use easily, they could then charge a subscription fee for its continued development, and all on-top of the initial build costs. They then enjoyed having their clients locked in to use their system for which they could charge again for training and upgrades.

But too many factors were beyond the control of these independent web consultants. However much control they gave to their clients for managing their websites, and however easy they made it to do, they were prone to miss out on much of the functionality which was needed to make the website really valuable: How does it rank in the search engines.

SEO (search engine optimisation) is the activity which gets websites indexed well, and listed highly whenever someone enters a search term they are targeting. Custom-built CMSes were notoriously bad at keeping up with SEO rules and this led to their websites sliding down the rankings and being replaced by younger (often less useful) sites simply because they presented themselves in a more digestible manner to the search engines.

Popularity of CMS types

These days the most effective CMSes are all open source. Whether it is the way they are developed (simultaneously by thousands of developers all the time), or just because its 100% free (running down the usual advantages enjoyed by paid solutions), all the search engines seem to favour open source software. In our tests, WordPress, Drupal and Joomla websites all feature more strongly in search results than do sites built on commercial CMS’s. Microsoft has a strong solution in this field but – perhaps unsurprisingly – Google doesn’t appear to favour it over any of the others. Indeed the opposite seems the case.

Now that it has been discovered what a strong position sites can take when they are on the right platform, migrating CMS is quite commonplace. More and more websites are moving their static html websites to a CMS, or from a less facilitated CMS to WordPress, Joomla or Drupal.

Often it can be done without any apparent changes to the website itself, meaning no regular visitors would ever notice something had occurred behind the scenes.  Remarkable things can happen to traffic numbers following CMS migration. Web Inclusion has witnessed as much as 30% increase in sales within a single year purely as a result of CMS migration.

If you are considering migrating your site to a different CMS see this article:

Which CMS is right for my website?

Tim Brocklehurst, CEO of Web Inclusion, is visiting Abu Dhabi and Dubai between 17th and 21st February 2013. If you are hoping to achieve big things on the Internet in 2013 this is a great opportunity to get some insight and strategic advice from a leader in the field.

Tim will be hosting one-to-one meetings in the Emirates Palace hotel in Abu Dhabi and The Palace Downtown Dubai,  or he can come to your office. Please register your interest on the form below and we will come back to fix a date and time.

“Tim has transformed our business. From losing market share two years ago we now have gathered 30% sales growth year-on-year thanks to the strategies, tools and training he gave us!”.
Lucinda Muschialli

Marketing Director

John Newton Co. Ltd.

Tim Brocklehurst CEO, Web Inclusion

 

 

Tim Brocklehurst CEO, Web Inclusion

Web Inclusion’s CEO Tim Brocklehurst is visiting UAE from London on 17th until 21st February 2013, and is offering consultancy during that week.

This is a great opportunity for companies needing direction and strategy on the Internet to get the best advice from a leader in the field. The first session will be complimentary.

If you require help getting more traffic to your website, converting more visitors to sales or even starting a website from scratch, this is a chance to kick-start the project in style. Tim is a recognised expert in SEO, visitor engagement, keyword research, multivariate testing and online copywriting. He is also renowned for his success with subscription and email marketing. Give your business the edge it needs to fly in 2013 and book your consultation now.

Tim will be hosting one-to-one meetings in the Emirates Palace hotel in Abu Dhabi and The Palace Downtown Dubai,  or he can come to your office. Please register your interest on the form below and we will come back to fix a date and time.

The site is due to be launched in February. More news to follow shortly.

The domain name is important partly because it will appear in every URL you get indexed in Google. For that reason, it will help to use a term which you know your target audience might use to search you by. If you have a well-known brand name then of course it must be used in the URL, but if you are a start-up, and your brand isn’t known yet, then choosing your domain gives you an opportunity to stake your claim and gain competitive advantage over those who have been around longer than you.

An example of a well chosen domain name is eventcourse.com. This is the trading name of Ashdown Academy online. It is an academic company which was established to provide tutoring and training towards a post graduate and a diploma certificate. The keyword research we conducted for Ashdown Academy revealed 131 opportunity keywords. 40 of them contained ‘event’ and ‘course’ in them, and half of those had more than 1,000 searches per month. (see table below). Event Course stood out as a good brand name and URL for their new company therefore. It is short and easy to remember. It is difficult to miss-spell and it incorporates the two words most commonly used in search terms by its target audience.

As a keyword itself, event course gets over sixty thousand searches per month. But, not surprisingly, it has over a million competing pages. In itself it doesn’t make it onto the opportunity keyword list therefore, and yet within six months of launch, eventcourse.com now ranks top in Google for that search term – ‘event course’ – from over 950 million indexed pages.

Without keyword research, there are numerous other domains which might have been chosen. Some of them might have had a good ‘ring’ to them, and might even be memorable, but none can have performed as well as eventcourse.com.

Need help choosing a domain name?

Get in touch and let us guide you through the process:

Now that Google has become the first place we go when we need to find something, article marketing has become a vital method for intercepting searches and presenting your product as the answer.

To do this, you have to provide Google with what it needs to list your page high in its results for your target keyword.

Article marketing begins with keyword research. You first of all need to identify your opportunity keywords so you can know what to put in the titles of your articles. As long as your website is optimised (Web Inclusion sites are *always* optimised), then the keyword will automatically appear in the URL for the page as well. (optimised sites use the page title to set the URL).

Articles for marketing need to be no less than 400 words long. That seems to be the minimum Google requires to take a page seriously. It is sometimes possible to rank with less than 400 words but it depends on the keyword, and how much competition there is for it.

Keyword density is a percentage figure signifying the number of times a keyword appears in an article relative to the size of the article. Ideally you want your target keyword to have no less than 1% (once every 100 words) and no more than 2% (once every 50 words). If it appears too often in the article Google may consider it to be contrived and can penalise, or just not index, the page.

You also need to include keywords which Google recognises as ‘associated keywords’ in the article. You can get a handful (six or seven) of these by using Google’s own Keyword Tool which returns results sorted by relevance. These need only have a very low keyword density (less than 1%) but it is important to include them because they add credence and more weight to the relevance of your article to its title keyword.

Finally, and wherever possible, include an image in your article. When you include an image make sure it is tagged correctly and use your target keyword in the title and alt-text tags.

If you do all of the things outlined here, and if you use an opportunity keyword as your target keyword, then you should find your article makes it to the front page of google quite quickly.

How long it stays there depends on other factors which Google uses in its algorithm, such as the volume of backlinks the page has, or social mentions (twitter, facebook, linked in etc.) So once your article is published it is a good idea to reinforce it by giving it mentions and links from your social networks, and also from forums, article directories and anywhere else you can.

Article Directories

There are hundreds of article marketing directories. Some of them are specific to particular niches, others cover everything. It is necessary to pick your article directories carefully so the work you do isn’t wasted. Go for the ones with a high google page rank (more than 5) because backlinks from them are more valuable.

When you post a version of your article to an article directory, make sure it is a different version than that you have posted on your site. It could be shorter, or you could mix up the paragraphs, but Google won’t index it if it finds it to be anything more than 30% duplicated from another page in its database.

Follow this advice with your next article marketing campaign and watch your traffic grow.

Google makes it simple for us to find out how many searches a keyword gets by using their Keyword Tool. This will return the number of local (in your country) and global searches (on average) each month.

Discovering how many competing pages there are is a more manual process. For this we must type the keyword in Google  preceded by “Allintitle:”, as per the example below.

The figure given in grey is the number of results with your keyword in the title of the page. (26,300 in the case of ‘sheepskin coat’.

As a rule of thumb, you can identify your opportunity keywords as those which have more than 1,000 searches per month and less than 1,000 competing pages. If you publish an article with an opportunity keyword in the title and relevant associated keywords in the article body then, providing your website is optimised for Google, you can expect it to be listed well – perhaps even in the top ten – within hours.

Opportunity keywords therefore give us a great, and free, way to attract good volumes of targeted traffic from organic search.

Another important criteria for Google’s algorithm is whether or not the keyword appears in the URL of the page. You can tell how much URL competition there is for any of your keywords by doing a search with “allinurl:” preceding the keyword. As above, the number given in grey on the first page of results is the answer.

]]> http://webinclusion.com/seo/keyword-research/what-are-opportunity-keywords/feed/ 0 http://webinclusion.com/seo/keyword-research/keyword-research-step-by-step/ http://webinclusion.com/seo/keyword-research/keyword-research-step-by-step/#comments Tue, 15 Jan 2013 13:08:07 +0000 Admin http://webinclusion.com/?p=334

To do this, you need the the Google Keyword Tool. Just enter a single keyword in the “Word or phrase” box and click search. Then click the ‘Download’ button to save the list of resulting keyword ideas on your local machine together with their search volume (local and global).
NB: Google will give more keyword ideas if you are signed in with a (free) Google Adwords account.

Once you have a full list of AIT results you can then order your spreadsheet to show those with the least competition first. You should look for keywords which have an AIT less than 1,000 yet more than 1,000 searches (either local or Global, depending on your audience). These are then your opportunity keywords.