Europcar International Franchisee Websites Search Engine Optimisation

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1 Introduction Everybody would like their site to be found easily on search engines. There is no magic that can guarantee this, but there are some principles that by following will help in your search engine positioning. There are many specialist companies who help companies to get better placement in search engines and also much has been written on search engine optimisation (SEO). This document does not try to replace either of these. Instead we have attempted to present the basics of how to list and promote your site and how to apply the techniques that will help you to improve your site s ranking through the Fourth Wave content management system (CMS). The guide is based on our experience and generally accepted industry guidelines on how to improve website search rankings. The Basics Firstly, nobody can guarantee you positions in the search rankings. Search engines keep their search algorithms very secret and update them regularly to try to make sure that their search engines rank sites according to what is best for the web user, rather than who has used the best SEO techniques. The second thing to know is that search engine optimisation takes real work. You re going to have to give it some thought and make changes to the pages in your site. This will take time and you may want to adjust things after a few months as you start to see results. It is going to take some time for your rankings to improve. Search engines can take months to even list your site and then further time to assign you a rank. They will then review your site periodically and check for updates but the frequency of this can vary. So don t expect too much too soon. Be patient, build your credibility and presence, and good things will come. Many sites that rank highly have been around a long, long time. And finally, the best way to ensure you attract customers is focus on your website content and usability (how visitors interact with your site). When it comes to search engines rating your site, Content is king! If it is relevant and useful, then when people come to your site, they are more likely to end up booking a car with you. What applies to real users also applies to the search engines! Once a new website goes live, you have two challenges: getting your site listed, and improving its ranking on the search engines. Getting your Website listed There are two approaches to this. The first way is to submit your URL (that is the address of your website e.g. directly to the search engines using the add url pages that they provide, e.g. Google Yahoo Bing This method should in theory allow them to index your site quickly and efficiently. Fourth Wave Consulting SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION.DOCX 12 May 2018

2 Inbound links The other way to get your site listed is by using inbound links. Inbound links are one of the more important ways of giving your site a high ranking in search engines and so it is important to start getting these links as soon as you can. Even a single high quality inbound link can put the search engines onto your site and get it indexed quickly. Once at your site, the search engine web crawlers, spiders or bots will then catalogue all the pages and work out how it links together. This way all the search engines that are known to the site that links to your site will find their way onto your site. The best links are from sites that are high up in the search engines and have content that is relevant to your own site. There are several ways to go about getting good inbound links; here are a few recommendations: If you have existing sites within your group that are indexed, then create links to your Car Rental site from them. Add your site to relevant local directories these might be business directories or interest/subject based directories, but make sure they are reputable. Contact webmasters of your business partners and ask them to link to your site. You will be encouraged to link back to them, but only do this if it is relevant to users of your site. Write articles or news stories for your local online newspapers. Make sure the article contains some of your relevant keywords. Post comments on relevant forums, blogs, twitter etc If you can, make sure that the link contains your favoured keywords e.g. for more information on car rental in Atlantis, visit the Europcar Atlantis website (where the underlined text is your link. Once your site has been indexed, you re in a much stronger position; sites that have been around for a long time tend to stay in the search engines. You can check and see if your site is listed by typing site: into the Google or Yahoo search. Remember if you have multiple domain names make sure you try each of them. It is not just having your site listed and linked to by high ranking sites that is important in the positioning of your site on the search engines, it is also optimising the site so that you present the site to the search engines in a way that helps them (as unintelligent machines) realise the relevance of your site to the outside world. Fourth Wave Consulting SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION.DOCX 12 May 2018

3 Optimising your site The job of the spiders that trawl through your website, is to extract relevant information so that when someone enters some words on their search engine, they list the most relevant sites to them first. The task of search engine optimisation of a site is to help the spider to do their job well! Search engines look for consistency and relevancy within a number of different areas of your in-page content and within your referral links. It is important that the site is very focused on the aspects of your product / service that are relevant to people who you want to do business with you. These include: The URL (or web address) of your page, e.g. etc. Page Title: e.g. Renting a car in Atlantis Keywords meta data: e.g. car rental, rent a car in Atlantis, Atlantis rental cars, short-term rental Description meta data: e.g. Car Rental in Atlantis cars available at the seaports of Herculanum and Isolatum The Page Content: The text that is on your page. Links on your pages, including the anchor text, that is the text on which the link is attached. Images on your pages, including the name of the image file, and the link (if any) set on the image and the alt tag. Site Maps Each of these points are described in further detail, together with instructions of how to create or maintain them within the Fourth Wave CMS in Appendix A. Search engines are in a constant battle with link spammers who attempt to manipulate ranking results for profit. Optimising your pages and encouraging genuine link backs from other relevant sites will help but avoid the temptation of building sites primarily around search engines, rather than around the client who will be visiting your site. Apart from the fact that the site might be blacklisted because it seems to be spamming keywords, you will not give confidence to the site users if the site is built for machines, rather than for humans! Keywords explained Keywords are words or phrases that you want people to be able to find you under when they perform a search on the internet. These are essentially the words or phrases that best describe your business and the things that people would think of when they are interested in your services. The more specifically the words or phrases match what you offer, the more likely they will be to drive people to your site. Using two or three word phrases improves your chances of ranking highly as these phrases should be more specific to what you are offering. For example car hire Atlantis produces much less competition than rental, i.e. there is a greater chance you could score highly with car hire Atlantis as fewer websites compete for this word. As the effectiveness of search engines improve, the number of search results will drop, so it s a balancing act between being on page 100 for a top phrase with millions of searches and being on page 1 for a less used phrase with only a few thousand. It is often considered that higher up and more focused is better. Fourth Wave Consulting SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION.DOCX 12 May 2018

4 How many keywords should you use? Most articles suggest less is more; around 5 keyword phrases per page should be your target and certainly do not exceed e.g. Europcar Atlantis, car rental, rent a car in Atlantis, Atlantis rental cars, short-term rental is 5 keyword phrases (usually just separated by a comma). Your brand name should normally be included in your keywords (and probably included in your URL too). Don t forget, your keywords will need to vary from page to page reflecting the contents of that page. There can be some overlap, but you can take different content on different pages as an opportunity to expand your list of keywords. It s best to plan the keywords for each of your pages and only then start to go through the pages themselves and make sure the keywords are correctly represented and consistent in the right places. How much effort is it worth putting in? Many organisations start off with a policy of using paid-for advertising either in traditional media or by using Google Adwords and other search engine advertising to drive users to their website when it is first launched. Because the pathway to getting a site optimised so that it will appear in the first few pages of a particular search engine is time consuming (and therefore expensive if you are using an agency), making sure that your site is listed at the top of the first page of Google by paying for Google Adwords can be a convenient and highly effective starting point. However, even if you are using paid-for advertising, it is still important to make your website as search-engine friendly as possible, so that the traffic starts to build up in the background, that can, in time, take over from paid-for advertising. If you have further questions, or suggestions for this guide, please us at europcarsupport@4wave.co.uk Fourth Wave Consulting SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION.DOCX 12 May 2018

5 Appendix A Using the Fourth Wave CMS to Optimise your site Web Address or URL of Pages Search engines do not favour lots of Web Addresses going to the same site content, so registering multiple web addresses to point at a single site is not a recommended approach. The URL does reflect your identity and strengthens your brand and therefore it should do this as straightforwardly as possible. So for Europcar Altantis or (assuming that Atlantis has the.ax domain!) would both be very acceptable addresses. They are also clear and memorable. Where you are linking in to a particular page externally, it is much better to use an address that has words to do with a page. We use Real Name URL s for all links within the site. Page Titles/ Keywords and Description Meta Data Default Descriptions and Keywords are entered in > Site Parameters For each Page or Section, they are entered in > Menus / MegaNav Menu v5 For GEO Pages, they are entered in > Site GEO Pages They can be entered in each language that you use on the site. Note that it is important that you ensure that the Meta description of each page is unique, utilises the amount of characters available (around 155 characters) and contains a clear call to action. The Page Content When you plan your site, make sure that you include some free text pages that contain content that expands on your main keywords. So describe the car hire facilities that you offer. However do ensure that you are writing for the visitors to the site, rather than for the SEO spiders! Fourth Wave Consulting SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION.DOCX 12 May 2018

6 Links on your pages, including the anchor text You can create links within the free text on pages to other pages on the site that relate to the subject. So you might write in an About Europcar Atlantis page: Europcar Atlantis has five rental stations on the Island of Atlantis. Take a look at our wide range of reliable, latest model cars. If you are new to car hire, you might find that our guide to car hire is of use, and if you have not driven in Atlantis before, see our handy tips on driving in Atlantis. Each of the underlined words are what is termed as anchor text, that contain a link to another page on the site. To do this, highlight the text that you want to use as your anchor text in this case the words we help you 24/7 and then press the link button (which is circled in red) Images on your Pages Images on your free text pages should, if possible, have the image file with a name that describes the image and an alt tag that describes the image especially if this reflects a keyword. This can be done through the CMS see the User Guide Site Maps The CMS automatically creates a site map of your site with a link to this from the bottom links. You do not need to anything to maintain this, as the site map is updated automatically by the CMS each week. Fourth Wave Consulting SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION.DOCX 12 May 2018