Opace discuss best practice optimisation tips for your CMS or ecommerce website

Optimisation has to be a great idea for all businesses

"Many webmasters fail to optimise their CMS or ecommerce websites, which is why they don't end up ranking as well as they should," says David Bryan, Managing Director of Birmingham-based SEO company Opace. "Often it's the smallest tweaks to a website that can make a big difference to the user experience it provides, which in turn helps to boost search engine rankings."

So what can businesses do to ensure their CMS or ecommerce websites are well optimised? Well according to Opace's best practice tips, they can start with something as simple as making sure they are using the latest version of their platform. Updating a CMS or ecommerce system not only allows companies to benefit from improved speed and functionality but also reduces the risk of their sites getting hacked. It's really simple to complete the update on open source platforms like WordPress, Joomla and Magento and will help to show customers that your business is cutting edge and forward thinking.

Some optimisation suggestions

Too many plugins can also slow down a website, which can lead to high bounce rates and poor SEO. Opace recommends that users remove any plugins and themes they no longer use and get rid of any plugins that are providing little value to their site visitors. Not only will this speed up your website but it will also improve its security and prevent it from looking cluttered.

With so many people using their smartphones and tablets to browse the internet, it's now more important than ever to ensure your website delivers a great user experience. One of the easiest ways you can do this is to keep the memory usage to a minimum. The lower the KB of your site, the faster it will load, helping to encourage visitors to stick around. Since speed is an important factor in SEO, keeping your file and image size low can also help to boost your site's search engine rankings.

Wondering how fast your site is loading? The best way to find out is to use an online tool like Google PageSpeed Insights. Simply type in your URL and it will give you a score for your page loading times on mobiles and desktops. It will also provide you with valuable suggestions on the improvements you need to make to your website in order to make in more user friendly.

Another big mistake many webmasters seem to be making is automating their titles, descriptions and H1 tags. Sure, it's quicker and easier to get a software tool to do this for you but watch out, because Google considers this practice to be 'black hat.' The SEO benefit of titles and H1 tags can be lost through automation and if your tags are duplicated, you may (and probably will) end up being penalised by Google. Automated titles, descriptions and tags can also cause readability issues that will affect your website or ecommerce store's user experience, which may in turn lead to a loss in rankings.

Instead of using a software tool, you should be writing unique and engaging titles, descriptions and H1 tags that inform users and search engines about the content they can expect to find on a page.

It's also considered best practice to make use of your CMS or ecommerce system's categories and tags. These are proven to improve SEO and increase traffic to a website. They also make it easier for your site visitors to find the information or products they are interested in much more quickly, thereby improving your website's overall user experience. The better user experience you provide, the more likely you are to see an increase in your search rankings.

SEO Plugins

Lastly, you may want to consider integrating your CMS or ecommerce website with an SEO plugin like Yoast, All in One SEO Pack or SEO Suite Ultimate. These SEO plugins help you to optimise your titles, tags, descriptions, categories and H1 tags and help to achieve higher search rankings.

When optimising your CMS or ecommerce system, the key is to keep your site visitors in mind at all times. Providing the changes you make are for their benefit, you will be helping to boost your SEO too.

For more information about optimising your CMS or ecommerce system and improving it's SEO. Visit the Opace website www.opace.co.uk.

Contact information
Telephone: 0845 017 7661
Email: info@opace.co.uk
Address: Opace Ltd
Longbridge Technology Park
Birmingham
West Midlands
B31 2TS

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