Once your website is live, there's a number of ways to keep it high up the Google searches & ensure it is working efficiently for you. Our in-house guide on website optimisation is below.
1. About search engine optimisation
Google ranks sites based on its internal mechanism to determine a site's importance. Google scans each site every now and automatically and calls this 'indexing'. Other search engines also perform this task in a similar way but for the purpose of this document we will be discussing Google.
The primary way of driving up a website's ranking is based on other sites linked to yours. How 'important' the other site is that links to your site will dictate the importance of your site on Google.
E.g. if your local newspaper's website has a good ranking on Google and they have a link to your website, Google will in turn raise the importance of your website and therefore its ranking on search results.
Other factors will dictate if Google will or will not boost your site's rankings. This includes making sure the HTML or code of the site is laid out correctly as well as relevant keywords being included in the text.
The final ranking mechanisms are down to Google but is is down to the website to ensure it follows the best practices to ensure you achieve the maximum page views and in turn conversions to sales.
2. Implement titles and descriptions
It is important that each page of your site has a unique 'title' and 'description'. both of these are invisible 'meta' sections of content, but in turn are what comes up in Google search results. The 'title' is in blue followed by the site's Url in green followed by the 'description' in black (screenshot below of Google's own title, Url and description):
You can modify the title and description of your own Meta data by navigating to the Edit Venue page via the Manage tab. Below is an example of Meta data filled out for our fictional demo venue, Grange Park School. To increase keyword based search, include all the content terms you would like e.g. 'book badminton courts' using correct grammar as you would in a normal sentence. Avoid as much as possible comma separating lists of keywords that do not make grammatical sense. A length of 20 words for the title and 50 for the description is good practice.
Example of meta titles and descriptions filled in on the website template:
3. Inner content in your website
Google utilises all the headings, text and other content on each of your web pages to pick out optimum keywords. BookingsPlus is built to automatically lay out the text in the best possible location and format for search engine optimisation.
You can edit the 'headline' field which is the main title on the landing page for your website. You will find this by navigating to the 'Edit Website' page via the Manage tab and then editing the 'Homepage Pitch' within the 'Home page' tab. You can load the content with text containing relevant keywords that users may search for when in Google.
4. Link building
Once the site is configured, it is down to link building to really optimise the rankings of your website within Google. To achieve the best results, attempt to have the main school website and any other local websites link directly to your BookingsPlus site. The more sites linking to you, the greater Google will advance your site within its algorithm.
You can achieve this by liaising with your local community content providers, such as news organisations and other locations that may be relevant to your BookingsPlus website.
See our separate article on Link Building
5. Extra information for social networks
When users 'share' a link on Twitter, Facebook and other social media, these networks scan the meta data of a site and utilise that to select the descriptive information that automatically comes up in the link. This includes the title, description and also a link to your BookingsPlus lettings website.
