Beginners Guide to SEO for your RiSE Website

Anthony Segavac
September 2, 2019

Our 7 simple tips to implement to improve your associations website

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of maximising the number of visitors to your website by increasing where the site appears on the list of results returned by a search engine. Working on your SEO to help your associations website appear high at the top of these searches is a great way to attract new visitors which can lead to more membership conversions, event or education sales and engagement.

Ensure your association website is Mobile Friendly

Google has previously announced websites that are not mobile friendly will see their Google Search ranking decline from previous results. Our world is based around living and working off our mobile devices, so making sure your website does work correctly in a mobile environment is a MUST. By using iMIS RiSE for your associations website you have access to mobile responsive templates or you can develop your own responsive templates.

You can check your websites Mobile Friendliness with a Google test.

A case study[1] based in the US found that sites that did not have a mobile friendly website before the massive update back in 2015 were hit with a large 50%+ traffic reduction penalty. This penalty happened because Google dropped their SEO rankings from the search results as mobile friendliness had become a ranking factor, this resulted in many people not being able to see and click onto their website therefore losing out on potential clients and sales.

Check No Sample Sites are Published or Active

When working with iMIS RiSE sample or demo website and sample pages under your business domain you do not want to have it published and available to the public, if you do have it “live” over a certain period of time eventually there is a higher possibility that Google will pick up the website information and can begin displaying it when people search about your company or your relevant page information.


Use Unique Titles through your website

In iMIS RiSE when you create a new web page you always need to give that page a title. This title is what will show up in Google Search results, so it is important to choose something that directly relates to your content on the page and that will grab a user’s attention. It is also important to choose your words strategically as they will be interpreted by Google as keywords for your content.


Make sure you add a page Description/Summary

Adding relatable information into your description text box within your RiSE web page’s “Properties” tab can also benefit your search engine ranking. When writing your description, it should be a small yet descriptive summary of the content on that specific page. Google search will generally index the text you specify there first before it will take text from the page.


Site Images are web friendly

Google has indicated site speed as well as page speed are additional factors being used by their algorithm to rank pages in search results. It is important to make sure that image sizes are scaled for the best load speed possible It is best to try and keep your images between 200kb (for smaller web images) and 500kb (for banner or larger images).

Using <alt> tags in your image code is also very important. Google uses alt text along with computer vision algorithms and the contents of the page to understand the subject matter of the image. The better your alt text the more chance your site will be rated higher and possibly ranked higher in the search list.

New features in iMIS EMS Enterprise for Open Graph Tags

In the newer version of iMIS 20.3 there has been a new “Advanced” section added to users to input code that is injected into the <HEAD> section. This is ideal for injecting specific Open Graph protocol metadata tags for your pages. One of the best things you can do to help your site’s SEO is to make use of the Open Graph tag code, particularly when your website is linked to social media. If you have correctly implemented these tags, it will then show the information that you have specified such as a certain image and description in the standard convention. For more information on visit; https://ogp.me/.

Clean URLs

It is very important to utilise shortcuts for URLs in RiSE! When creating a new web page that page does not inherit the title only into your URL. In RiSE your URL follows your folder structure and where the web page is located.

For example, creating a shortcut for your webpage to be www.yourdomain.com.au/Contact-Us is much beneficial than the default www.yourdomain.com.au/web/information/contact_us. Google also recommends using hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_).

Having a “clean” URL also helps with SEO as it is concise and meaningful to users. You can also use keywords in your shortcuts. Clean URLs are also generally more memorable; having an intuitive meaning when viewed in browser history or when read out.

Do you have a RiSE website project or want to find out how Causeis can improve your SEO?

Reach out to us on 1300 CAUSEIS (1300 228 734) or feel free to send us an email at [email protected]

[1] Is Your Non-Mobile Friendly Website Costing You Traffic and Business? (https://www.bluecorona.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Blue-Corona-Case-Study-Why-Go-Mobile-Friendly.pdf)

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