Using a CMS for SearchEngine Optimisation (SEO):the smart way to hit yourtarget.

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White PaperUsing a CMS for Search Engine Optimisation

Table of Contents

Page 1 Introduction

Page 1 Isn’t it all a bit hit and miss?

Page 1 Which search engines should you be targeting?

Page 1 Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising

Page 2 PPC advertising: the pros and cons

Page 3 Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Page 4 Pareto’s Principle

Page 6 SEO: the pros and cons

Page 6 How does a CMS improve

Page 6 System capabilities

Page 7 Empowering users

Page 7 Preventing damaging activities

Page 8 How Alterian CMS helps SEO

Page 8 Where next?

Page 9 SEO in practice: Capio Healthcare UK

Page 10 Conclusion

Page 11 Sources of reference

Page 11 Terms of reference

Page 12 About Alterian

White PaperUsing a CMS for Search Engine Optimisation

IntroductionWhen the web was created way back in 1990, no-one could haveimagined the scale of its impact on modern society. Today, thereare more than 100 million sites vying for the attention of morethan 1,076,203,987 worldwide. At least 80 per cent of them willuse a search engine to find the goods, services and informationthey want.

When they do that, you don’t simply want your name to cometop of the list, ahead of your competitors – you also want tomake it clear to the searcher that you have exactly what they’relooking for. You want their search to start –and end - with you.

• In January 2007 the number of internet users worldwidereached 1,076,203,987 – including 308,712,903 in Europe(source: www.internetworldstats.com), with UK usersaccounting for 37,600,000 (source: ITU).

• Over 100 million websites by November 2006 (source:www.netcraft.com).

• At least 80% of users find new websites using search engines(source: www.searchenginewatch.com).

• 91% of adults in the UK who have ever used the internet haveused a search engine to find information on goods and services(source: Office of National Statistics, October 2005).

• The internet is the second most commonly used medium aftertelevision (source: BMRB Internet Monitor, January 2006).

Isn’t it all a bit hit and miss?A fabulously designed website will not be enough to get younoticed. You can point people to your site from business cards,advertising and sale literature – but that’s a mere drop in theocean.

Remember, you’re one in 100 million and people won’t find youunless they know you’re there – or you come up in a search. Youcould submit your site to a number of search engines in the hopeof getting more hits, but keeping your name high in the listingscan be expensive and will not, in reality, make your site anyeasier to find. As we all know, punching in a list of keywordsdoesn’t always get the results you want. You may have to doquite a bit of digging around and be prepared to trawl throughseveral pages of results before you track down that vital piece ofinformation.

What you really need is be able to anticipate how people lookfor information, and exploit the way search engines operate toincrease the chances of them beating a path to your door.

This can be done through Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)and/or Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Both methods can be veryeffective in getting people who are searching for your productsand services to click through to your website.

Which search engines should you betargeting?There are really only half a dozen search engines worth yourattention - Google, Yahoo and MSN being the biggest. Accordingto Emarketer, by December 2005, almost half of all searchesconducted in the US (see below) were with Google. Nowadays, wedon’t search for it – we ‘google’ it

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertisingGiven that roughly eight out of ten internet users use a searchengine to find what they are looking for, unless you appear on thefirst page of results, you’re unlikely to generate many hits. Oneway of making more certain of being up there with the winners isto use the Pay-Per-Click (PPC) service offered by major searchengines.

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Source: comScore for SearchEngineWatch.com

Google: 43.7%

Yahoo: 28.8%

Others: 3.4%

MSN: 12.8%

Ask: 5.4%AOL: 5.9%

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Here’s how it works.

PPC adverts are those that appear at the top and to the right ofthe search results page. These are displayed whenever a searchertypes in the key phrases that you have identified the ones thatmost closely reflect what you are offering your audience.

The adverts work by bidding on certain keywords and phrases: thehigher your bid, the higher your advert is placed – but you onlypay when someone clicks on your advertisement. So you canafford to set up hundreds of potential key phrases.There are three key players in the PPC market: Google, Overtureand Miva (formerly Espotting). These three companies feed themajority of the search networks currently operating and eachrepresents slightly different user demographics (Overture, forexample, supplies Yahoo and MSN). For PPC to work, you need tofind the provider that is preferred by your target market.

PPC advertising: the pros and consPros:PPC advertising is fast to set up, and can be managed effectivelyby monitoring budgets and measuring ROI, offering a rapid,reliable strategy for increasing traffic to your site. By usingkeywords that are relevant to your business, visitors are led to yoursite by search terms rather than its content. Visitors are directed topages specific to their requirements, so that they don’t have todrill down through the site themselves.

Cons:If your products and services compete a hotly contested marketthan the ‘cost-per-click’ could well be in tens of pounds. You needto be very sure how and where you will get value for money.What’s more, the bidding for popular keywords can becomeextremely costly and the amount of effort required to managethem could easily become a full-time job for someone.

Pay-per-click

free ‘organic’listings

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Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)The blogosphere provides some useful insights in how searchengines work and suggestions as to how processes can beleveraged to improve your rankings. Frequent visits to the blog ofGoogle’s highly respected developer Matt Cuttswww.mattcutts.com and Jill Whalen’s High Ranking Advisorwww.highrankings.com, for example, can provide some valuablepointers.

A critical success factor is being able to capitalise not simply onthe search terms, but those areas on the page to which users aretypically drawn. A recent report from Eyetools, www.eyetools.comhighlighted what it describes as the ‘golden triangle’. Whether youuse PPC or SEO, that’s where you want your name to come up.

Of course, everyone is chasing a handful of highly prizedcompetitive search terms in their particular industry – and wants tobe in the golden triangle. SEO lets you look beyond thecompetitive terms – and focus attention on the ‘long tail’.Chris Anderson from Wired Magazine is well known for his ‘long

tail’ economics theory (www.longtail.com). While the origins of theLong Tail are not in SEO, the principle relates perfectly. The idea isactually very simple.

free ‘organic’listings

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Pareto’s PrincipleYou’ve probably heard of Pareto's Principle – The 80-20 Rule –based on the premise that you get 80% of your business from 20%of your customers. So it obviously makes more sense to focus yourattention on the most important group financially (the 20%).However, in SEO this comes at a huge cost both in terms oforganic search competition and in PPC keyword pricing.Employing an SEO strategy that targets the ‘head’, see below, ispotentially expensive and difficult due to the competitivemarketplace of internet searching. There is more to be gained bytargeting the remaining 80% - the long tail.

Applied in the context of search engines, this means that you canmore easily get to the top of search engine results by logicallyextending competitive phrases such as ‘content management’with other keywords such as geographical descriptors (countries,counties, towns and postcodes) and technological descriptors(hardware, operating systems and software). Alterian was one ofthe first CMS providers to recognise the value of the ‘long tail’theory in the context of SEO.

The Marketplace

Long TailHead

Variety

SalesVolume

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However, if you search instead for ‘.net content management’,then the number of search returns drops to a quarter of a billionand Alterian appears at number one – right at the hotspot of the

golden triangle. A similar search for ‘content management uk’generates an even smaller number of returns and still givesAlterian that important No. 1 slot.

By focusing on getting our search engine marketing right when wedid has made a dramatic difference to the growth of the companyin an extremely competitive market. And we used our own

Alterian CMS product to help us achieve these results throughSEO.

White PaperUsing a CMS for Search Engine Optimisation

SEO: the pros and consPros:Compared with PPC, SEO can achieve higher page rankings for asmaller budget. Once you have understood and deployed thetechnique throughout your pages, you are likely to drive a higherrate of click-throughs organically. What’s more, once you get itright – it tends to stay right. Overall, the return on investmentneeds to be viewed in the long term.

Cons:Leading search engines tend to change their algorithms orparameters often. Every time the rules change, you have to re-jigyour SEO strategy to maintain high search rankings. SEO is a long-term investment and the results can be variable, particularly whencontent editors are getting up to speed on new techniques. Aswith PPC, managing SEO can become a full time job.

How does a CMS improveBefore we answer that, you need to know a bit about how theAlterian CMS works…

A good content management system makes it as easy as possiblefor non-technical users to create, develop and maintain webcontent. Alterian, for example, has focused on making its browserinterface rich, intuitive and functional so that users with just a basicknowledge of word processing and spreadsheet tools can beproductive almost immediately. Similar to most Microsoft Officesoftware, Alterian CMS features a true in-context WYSIWYG editorallowing both technical and non-technical users to quickly becomefamiliar with the system.

The layout of content is controlled by templates and style-sheets.The templates determine where users can add and managecontent and the style-sheets determine what the content lookslike. This includes typefaces, size and colour of headings and theamount of space between lines. The CMS separates content frompresentation, with the content entered and stored in a raw, un-styled format within a database. When visitors click on a page, thesystem marries up the content with the presentation, serving upthe complete page in an instant.

The advantages of this approach are that content can bepresented in a variety of formats such as: text-only, mobile and

digital television users, screen reader and audio browser. The CMScan also be used for collaborative projects, particularly whereorganisations have large scale publishing needs, allowing othersto contribute and comment, before outputting it to a documentcreation tools such as QuarkExpress for print production. Anotheradvantage of separating content from presentation is that it canbe personalised. For example, when content is entered intoAlterian, a number of pre-determined metadata categories can beselected which will control how and where the content will bedisplayed. Content can also be re-used in different locations on asite, reducing duplication of effort and making sure that when themaster version of that information is updated all other views areautomatically updated.

The Alterian CMS helps search engine marketing through:

1. Built-in system capabilities2. Empowering users to carry out key activities3. Preventing activities that could have a negative effect

System capabilitiesAlterian is recognised for website accessibility through thecreation and maintenance of XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant code.While we believe every organisation should be creating accessiblewebsites, it is not always a top priority in commercialenvironments. Yet, for organisations looking to get high pagerankings with search engines, creating an accessible website canbe a big help.That’s because as you make the site accessible to users, you alsomake it accessible to search engine crawlers and robots – theautomated bits of code that investigate sites to determine howrelevant they are to keyword search.Alterian CMS also has ‘search engine friendly URLs’. To crawlersand robots, these URLs return a friendly, real world, webpageaddress – not technobabble containing ‘session numbers’ or ‘pageIDs’.Search engine spiders love websites with site maps because, oncelocated, the spider can find, follow and index every page on thesite following a single link. Virtually all CMS solutions allow theautomatic generation and updating of site maps.CMS software allows you to add text descriptions (alt tags) whichmake images accessible to visually impaired visitors who use

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White PaperUsing a CMS for Search Engine Optimisation

‘readers’ to understand what content is on the page. Searchengines cannot read images, but they can read alt tags.We also have a built-in tool to check links, so that when spidersvisit pages, they see and follow the link. Since each link has abearing on search relevance, it’s important that the text isdescriptive, relevant to the content it points to - and unbroken.

Empowering usersOur experience has shown that the page title tag is significant insearch engine optimisation. Making the keywords in the page titletag as relevant as possible to the page content enables searchengine crawlers to determine the relevance of a page againstthem. Alterian’s CMS enables users to create and manage pagetitle tags while maintaining navigation usability separately. Bymaking the page title tag relevant to the page content, the overallrelevance is increased intern leads to a better page ranking.

Other metadata, such as keywords and page descriptions, havebeen over-used in the past by those seeking to get to the top ofsearch returns. They are now typically ignored by search enginesin terms of ranking, but are still used to return page descriptionsand continue to play a useful and valid role in encouraging usersto click on a link.

Writing web copy differs from writing for a printed page. Alteriantemplates and stylesheets help users to structure information in afriendly, logical way for visitors and search engines. Alterian’saccessibility features make sure users follow a consistenthierarchical structure for page content, thereby avoiding the use ofmultiple main heading tags which could be viewed as spam.

Placing relevant keywords in links is not only good accessibilitypractice, it is also useful for crawlers to find their way through yoursite and determine page topic and relevance. Building links fromyour site, and particularly to it, aids search returns. The emphasishere is on getting good quality and very relevant links into yoursite. Even a few links to high ranking pages can make a significantdifference on your efforts.

Finally, enabling users to create new pages or groups of pageseasily and quickly helps to improve the relevance of content thatvisitors are likely to land on, particularly after following a ‘paid for’link. This use of landing pages or the creation of completemicrosites, coupled with webpage analysis, is recognised as aneffective way to improve click-through conversions.

Preventing damaging activitiesEven high profile sites can be blacklisted by search engines.Alterian’s CMS helps you to avoid the faults that deplete yoursearch engine score, such as duplicated links and content. Placingcontent that has already been indexed within a page caneffectively ‘demote’ that page. Making sure that most of thecontent on a page is unique – both within your website and on theweb at large, avoids this issue. It is also good practice not toduplicate content in the title tag so that two pages have the sametitle tag.

And don’t forget that search engines may penalise bad spelling,grammar and broken links. Workflow, spell checking and red-liningcapabilities of Alterian’s CMS can help improve the quality of a livesite.

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Where next?We have learned a lot from our own and other implementationsfocused on search engine marketing and we continue to explorehow we can help non-technical people do the things they need todo to make their search marketing efforts more effective, forexample:

• Managing the site verification process typically required byGoogle and Yahoo in order to use search related features suchas analytics and site map submissions.

• Generating Google/Yahoo specified site maps so that you cango through the process of site map submission more quicklyand easily.

• Better and easier control for non-technical users over therobots.txt – the thing that determines which bits of a site acrawler should look at and which bits it should ignore.

• Making it easier for non-technical people to add the code topages for analytics and conversion tracking.

Straightforward editorial control for page propertiesincluding: navigation, keywords, page title tag andRobots.txt.

Published code is compliant to XHTML 1.0 Strict.

Built-in WCAG 1.0 accessibility checker (single-A, double-A,triple-A)

Non-technical tools sets design to encourage developedpublishing controls to drive communications and regularity.

Ideal for non-technical users executing SEO strategies. Enablesfull control over the page title tag while maintains the usabilityof the site structure, navigation and content.

Clean code is search engine friendly. Content ingested viadrag and drop is cleaned to XHTML 1.0 Strict. Better browserand device support (pages render on browsers faster ondevices such as laptops and PDAs).

Browser-friendly, compliant code (compliant content hasgreater credibility and is believed to rank higher)

Ease of use for publishing including drag and drop ingestionfor Office documents through to blog and forum capabilities.Content proliferation and depth of information/topic authorityall enhance SEO for a site

How Alterian CMS helps SEO

White PaperUsing a CMS for Search Engine Optimisation

SEO in practice: Capio Healthcare UKCapio Healthcare is the UK’s fourth largest independent healthcareprovider. Historically its collection of websites was difficult to keepup-to-date and dynamic and web traffic was mainly generatedusing directories.

The implementation of Alterian very quickly helped to create up-to-date and dynamic websites, but more importantly, within a fewweeks the level of searches from organic results began to rise.

“In the past we have had difficulties reaching high listings in themajor search engines. Our previous CMS solution was not searchengine friendly. The generation of unclean code, unfriendly URLsand inability to create meta tags limited us in what could beachieved with search engine rankings. Alterian has provided asolution to all of these problems and our rankings have certainlyimproved,” explained Ross Finch, Webmaster, Capio HealthcareUK.

By using the ‘long tail’ keyword approach, Capio found that it wasachieving higher page rankings and the volume of search-generated traffic was increasing dramatically week by week.

Here are some examples…

The company currently enjoys a ‘golden triangle’ position on itsmost relevant keyphrase ‘private hospitals’.

Even with extremely competitive, 26 million return keyphrases like‘private healthcare’, Capio is making steady progress towards thetop pages and with extended phrases such as ‘private healthcareuk’ it is right up at the top.

The bottom line for Capio is that all treatments on offer enjoy a‘golden triangle’ position and that the search optimised site pulledin twice as many leads year on year.

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White PaperUsing a CMS for Search Engine Optimisation

ConclusionToday the internet is home to an increasing number of websitesand companies are competing in a transparent marketplace, on anequal footing. With over 100 million websites online, and eachwebsite containing any number of pages from one to anywhereover 100,000 – potentially all indexed by search engines, theimportance of having your website in the ‘Golden Triangle’ is clear.

Although organic SEO requires a greater depth of understanding,a CMS delivers many of the tools to achieve this – out-of-the-box.CMS prompts and guides non-technical users with littleunderstanding of SEO through some of the tasks that need to becarried out to help search engines successfully index andunderstand the relevance of pages, improving search returns.Other things that can be done to improve SEO are completedbehind the scenes in the code, without involvement from non-technical users. When organic SEO is carried out in conjunctionwith PPC advertising, the overall effect on a website’s visibility isvastly improved for search engines and visitors alike.

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White PaperUsing a CMS for Search Engine Optimisation

Sources of reference

www.longtail.com

www.internetworldstats.com

www.netcraft.com

www.searchenginewatch.com

www.highrankings.com

www.eyetools.com

www.mattcutts.com

Office of National Statistics, October 2005

BMRB Internet Monitor, January 2006

Emarketer, December 2005

ITU

Terms of reference

PPC Pay-Per-Click advertising

SEO Search Engine Optimisation (organic referrals)

SEM Search Engine Marketing

CMS Content Management System

CPC Cost-Per-Click

ROI Return on Investment

W3C Accessibility compliance legislation

WYSIWYG What You See Is What You Get user interface

URL Uniform Resource Locator or web address, typicallytyped into the address bar of a web browser

XML Extensible Markup Language aids web design usingcompliant with W3C legislation code, it was alsodesigned to support a wide variety of applications.

XHTML Extensible Hypertext Markup Language is a cleanertype of code that is friendly to search engines andsweb developers

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White PaperUsing a CMS for Search Engine Optimisation

About AlterianAlterian (LSE: ALN) empowers marketers with an integratedmarketing software platform combining database, online andoperational marketing applications on a shared datainfrastructure. The Alterian Integrated Marketing Platform makesit practical and cost effective for marketers to use actionableinsight to execute an integrated marketing strategy across onlineand offline channels.

It is the unique integration of analytics, content and executionthrough Alterian’s industry leading tools, such as the AlterianMessenger email platform, and the award winning Alterian WebContent Management solutions, which enables marketers todrive a seamless, multi-channel customer experience.

Alterian’s analytically-led software is delivered to approximately1,000 marketing departments, across 26 countries, and aninternational network of more than 100 business partners,including marketing services providers, agencies and systemsintegrators. Its partners, such as Accenture, Acxiom, AllantGroup, Cap Gemini, Carlson Marketing, Experian, Epsilon,InfoUSA, LogicaCMG, Merkle, Ogilvy One and Euro RSCGWorldwide, deliver Alterian software alongside their own domainand services expertise to help market leaders such as PrincessCruises, General Motors, Zurich, Astra Zeneca, HSBC, LimitedToo, AEGON, Avis, Worldwide Wrestling Entertainment, Dell,Amnesty International and Vodafone integrate marketingprocesses and drive competitive advantage. For moreinformation about Alterian, products within the AlterianIntegrated Marketing Platform or our Partner Network, pleasevisit www.alterian.com.

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