SEO/CMS

SEO:

SEO is the search engine optimisation, which involves making changes to your websites and designs that will make the site more attractive to a search engine. It is a way of making sure that the site ranks high t in the search engines for relevant content and keywords. You can optimising your websites for the search engine which will increase your visibility in the organic or unpaid search engine results. The optimisation area of SEO is down to the creators of the site to make sure that the title tags and the meta descriptions are informative and the right key words are used for them to come up in a search engine when those key words or information is searched for.

How it works:

Search engines such as google have a crawler which goes out and gathers information about the contents they can find on the internet, they bring all this information back to build an index, this data is then fed through an algorithm which attempts to match all the data with anything you would type into the box of the search engine such as Google, Bing and Yahoo.

Using SEO

Content and Related Mark Up:

The content of the page is what determines its position on a search result, it is what the user is looking for and therefore this is extremely important for a search engine as they are trying to satisfy their own customers and make sure they find what they are looking for on every search. Therefore when creating a site you have to make sure that the site has a demand and that it is linkable. The internet is effected by supply and demand, the best content that supplies the largest demand will earn itself a place at the top of the search results, it can take many forms, an image, video, sound or text but it must supply a demand to be considered to be good content. Good content further then needs to be linkable, if the site is not linkable then the search engine most likely wont rank it as it will not drive traffic to the given website. This relates to content that needs logging in to view or that is unable to be shared, this makes the content bad in the view of the search engine and therefore it is not going to rank high on the search lists.

The mark up would be the second most important thing to SEO after content and this relates to title tags, which are the the HTML that shows the title of the website and is used are the clickable headline for a given result in the search engine. This therefore needs to be informative, relatable and to justice to the content that the link will provide. The URL is also very important as it should supply the importance of the information on the page, often structured from pertains, context and general, this helps the search engine to determined the relevancy the site has to the search. This gives the search engine a way of optimising the relevance of the page without needing to process the contents so therefore this is important that is is correct for the site.

Therefore for our own website we need to make sure that the purpose of the page is directly stated in the following:

• Title Tag
• URL
• Contents of Page
• Image alt text

Website Used: https://moz.com/learn/seo/what-is-seo

CMS:

CMS stands for content management system, which is referring to the management of digital content. For web content management we need to have a content delivery application and and content delivery application, this allows us to control the content and design of the creation and we can also add and remove content from the site without having to know anything about the HTML and the content delivery system will deliver the content s once it has been created.

Elements of CMS:

• Indexing- this is the retrieval of all data that can be used for easy access through search functions and allow users to search by attributes such as publications dates, keywords and author. This allows the content to be relevant in a search engine.
• Format Management- This is when paper documents are scanned and used as electronic documents such as PDFs and HTML documents.
• Revision Features- This is important as it allows the site to be edited and changed after publication, this allows the sites to be updated and changed as time goes on and this of relevance changes for the viewers.
• Publishing Functionality- This allows individuals to use a template or a set of templates as well as wizards and other tools to manage, create and modify content on the site.

CMS can also provide one to one marketing, this is so that the website can tailor its contents and advertising to a user specific characteristic. This is done by information provided by the user or gathered on the site. For example if the user as search something such as a item of clothing, the advertising banners on the site would then consist of places that sell the item of clothing they had previously searched for. You may most commonly see this on social media site such as facebook.

Popular and Important features of CMS:

• SEO friendly URLs
• Integrated and Online Help such as discussion boards
• Group Based permission systems
• Full template support or customisable templates
• Admin panel with multiple language support.
• Minimal server requirements
• Integrated file managers.

These are all things we will need to take into consideration when we are designing our digital magazine for the brief.

Website Used- https://searchcontentmanagement.techtarget.com/definition/content-management-system-CMS

Before we created I final digital magazine design we create some mock ups in Wordpress. This allowed us to practise our skills with SEO and CMS you can see these on my WordPress page on the blog.