Search Engine Optimisation

There are a number of tools available to you to help maximise the search engine optimisation for your onCourse website.

Google tools

Google offer a range of really useful free tools to help drive search results to your site and analyse who is visiting your site, why they are visiting your site and how much they are spending.

Analytics

ish will automatically sign you up to this service when we set up your account. onCourse has special hooks into Google Analytics to pass through the ecommerce details of people who visit your site, so not only can you see who is coming to your site and from where, but you can see which sources of traffic result in actual money being spent. It is all very well to get thousands of page views from Facebook, but unless that traffic is generating enrolments you aren’t getting the results you really need.

Tag Manager

Google Tag Manager is a powerful tool which allows you to inject javascript, images or other content into your web pages. Every onCourse site automatically comes with a tag manager account for your use. Although you can get by with never logging into Tag Manager, this is a really useful way to dynamically add scripts to your site. There are so many tools available for you, many of them free.

• user tracking
• remarketing tools (following users around the internet with ads for your site)
• Facebook
• user experience measurement (eg. using hotjar to watch a user’s mouse clicks to see which parts of your site are hard to use)
• A-B testing (show different content to different users and measure the results)

Webmaster Tools

This free tool is something you can set up yourself. Just go to www.google.com/webmasters/tools and click "add a site". You’ll be given several choices for how to verify your site; choose "HTML file upload" option. Take the file and upload it to your onCourse site in the top of the /s folder using webDAV. Don’t forget to then publish your site changes into production.

You may decide to engage the services of an SEO company, and they may want to add your site to their own Webmaster tools. There is no problem with uploading several different Google html verification files to your site.

Once you have performed the verification, a huge number of options are available to you. Most importantly you’ll want to review your organic search results, look at who is linking to you, make sure Google knows which country you are in.

Site Map

onCourse automatically generates a sitemap for all your content, so you don’t need to maintain this by hand. This ensures that Google is able to locate every page in your site and index it. Whether you get page hits from Google search will of course depend on what you have on that page and how popular it is, but at least you know that Google will find every single page of your site.

For more information on Search Engine Optimization, refer to the SEO and analysis chapter of our Web Desgin manual.