Search Engine Optimisation

Is Web Management Studio 'Search Engine Friendly'?

We are often asked "how search-engine friendly is the Web Management Studio application?".  The short answer is that, from a search engine perspective, there is absolutely no difference between a web site managed by Web Management Studio and one say hand-crafted using a text editor - indeed, it could be argued that the Web Management Studio web site would be better strutured and less prone to scripting errors so would therefore be better!

If you want proof, just right-click this page and select the 'View Source' option from your browser's context menu and you will see regular xHTML script.  Better still, run the page against the W3C Markup Validation Service and you will see that the page is 100% compliant to the latest standards' (see our Web Standards section for more details on this important topic).

I want to be ranked #1 on Google...

Having established that Web Management Studio is more than capable of presenting a search engine friendly web site you might think that you can just sit back and watch your web site work its way to the top of the search engine rankings.  Unfortunately, it's not quite that simple...

For example, it is a common belief that correct MetaTag definitions are all that you need to achieve good ranking results. This may have been true some years ago, but now many of the search engines, including Google, have declared that they no longer consider MetaTags in their ranking algorithm as they are 'too unreliable'. You may want to review the following links for further information:

The general consensus now is that there are just three things that significantly influence search engine ranking:

  1. The number of web sites that present links to your web site
  2. Content that is relevant to your web site - the more the better
  3. The HTML structure and presentation of your web pages, i.e. good, standard compliant HTML!

Whilst these are the headlines, they also introduce some side-effects, namely:

  1. The number of visitors that your site attracts, and ...
  2. The relevance of the actual content found within your well structured HTML pages!

Realistically, Web Management Studio has no influence on your site's global appeal, nor how many other sites feel that your site is worthy of a link. What we can provide and this is, we believe a significant advantage of our product, is a structured environment that produces a good, standards compliant HTML content and provides you with all the tools necessary to quickly and easily build a content-rich web site.

Our embedded HTML Editor produces standard compliant output, but ultimately you will need to take responsibility for the way that the tool is used. For example, the use of appropriate headings within content is known to be a significant factor in search engine optimisation. When creating a page you can create headings/titles in one of (at least!) two ways:

  1. Apply the appropriate HTML tags to the heading text (all assignable within the Web Management Studio HTML Editor), or ...
  2. Create a paragraph and assign a larger font-size and font-weight to the text.

Visually the result may well look the same but to the search engine one is a structured heading and the other is some styled text! In short, our system provides all the tools and facilities for creating search engine friendly pages, you just need to make sure you use them appropriately!

If search engine optimisation is important to you, why not investigate our Search Engine Optimisation Service or feel free to call us on 0845 257 7132 for some general advice.