The quality of Content

Ensuring content in the main pages of the site is of quality is important in helping the optimization of the site. I amended the homepage content to include important keywords and phrases such as the ones highlighted below. Search engines pick up these keywords.

Robot Exclusion Standard

Whilst I was designing the humber mouth website, I did not want anybody viewing it until it was complete. To stop search engines picking up the site on their searches I used what is called a robot exclusion standard. It is a piece of code which sits at the root of the site in a txt file.

The code included in robot.txt:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

* = select all search engines
/ = disallows access to all parts of the site

Using Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. It is the most widely used website statistics service, currently in use at around 40% of the 10,000 most popular websites.

Traffic Sources Overview

The Traffic Sources Overview pie chart shows that 80% of traffic came from direct traffic, which is when the URL is entered into the browser and the visitor arrives directly at the website.

20% of traffic came from visitors who had searched for the website via search engines.

Trough further research on the traffic sources overview, I found what keywords users where searching for in google:

All these keywords are available on the website in form of page titles, keywords and phrases.

Map Overlay

The map overlay tool lets you know where your visitors are viewing the website from. This can be broken down into cities, countries, sub-continent region and continents.


After further research I found the visitors accessing my site where located in the Hull, Beverley, Sheffield, Cambridge, Rotherham, London, Sale and Manchester. Although some of these visitors did not stay on the site.


Bounce Rate

This bounce rate represents the percentage of initial visitors to a site who "bounce" away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within the same site.

Improving My S.E.O

To improve the SEO of the site:

- Keywords where inserted into each of the pages (not including login required pages) the keywords where styled so that they were invisible within the design of the site.

Keywords added: literature, books, reading, authors, festival, poetry, speakers, art, library, poets, novel, humber, mouth



- ALT tags were added to images within the site. Aswell as being good for accessibility, ALT tags filled with keywords can also be used to boost keyword frequency and help achieve better rankings in search engines.

- Off site SEO was used to help improve site optimization, by including links to my website in this blog and also on my portfolio site. It would help if the sites linking to the humber mouth site were more highly ranked and popular.

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optmiazation (S.E.O) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a website from search engines.

There is two types of S.E.O:

On site S.E.O

- Clear precise validated code
- Ensuring content in user and search engine relevent
- Metatags - using keywords which are important in relation to the criteria of the site

Off Site S.E.O

- Links from other sites into my site. The key to this is to make sure the cites that are linking to your site are well known website and are highly ranked themselves.

Social Networks

Part of our brief was to incorporate social networks into the site. On all pages I have included facebook and flickr buttons for users to access the humber mouth social networking sites.

PHP CMS

I have designed and coded a content management system for administration of humber mouth. They are able to add, edit and delete events on the website. I could further improve the site by adding an option to edit the homepage content. By continually changing content on the site this helps market the site and its position in the google search engine.