Tips on getting your website searched
Michael Pollock
time company about how to help get your website to turn up more in
natural web searches. This is as opposed to those paid searches that
turn up in a separate area and cost you money per click. These are
simple-to-do things that can make a difference to any nonprofit
website. Consider them as conversation topics to get your webmaster
to think about the search aspect of things.
The goal of a search engine program is twofold: 1) to maximize results
on branded terms ( i.e. someone searches for your company by its name
- which means they are already familiar with you); and 2) to maximize
results on category terms relevant to your org (they are searching for
ways to feed kids or cure cancer or whatever your thing is - but don't
know where to channel their efforts) -- this is the real challenge and
should be focus of program...
Images:
First, search engine crawlers are unable to read the copy inside of
images or Flash. So to a search engine, such a page is basically
completely blank space. Wherever possible, copy (especially copy
containing relevant keywords to the mission) should be in HTML text
rather than inside a GIF image or within a Flash movie.
Tagging:
The header tag of each page (the white text that appears in the blue
title bar at the very top of your browser) is very important to a
search engine. If your homepage just says your name: "Acme Charity"
this could be completely irrelevant to a search engine. The objective
for SEO (search engine optimization) is to get the site to appear when
someone types in "art materials for kids" or "Chinese orphans" etc -
so those are the words they should make sure appear in their title
tags of each page. And those words should be inside the text wherever
possible.
Links:
The # and relevancy of links to the site do indeed really help your
search engine ranking. However relevancy cannot be underestimated.
That means that the search engine cares what the link says. Image/
flash links are worthless b/c search engines can't read them. And
text links should have relevant text to describe what the org does,
i.e. the link shouldnt' just say "Acme" but instead it should say
"homelessness" or "jazz dance" or other words that tell the search
engine that those words are really relevant to that site to which they
link.