Now you've created your website you need to make sure people are looking at it! Search engine optimization is the process of ensuring that your Web pages are accessible to search engines and are built in the right way to help them improve the chances that they will be found.
The best way to get people to your website is through a search engine such as Google. Search engines enable people to find what they are looking for on the World Wide Web by typing a keyword or phrase into a search field. The search engine will match the keyword search query to the websites listed in its index and return a list of websites that are most relevant.
Search engines work in a variety of ways and each has a different logic. The world's leading search engine – Google – is a crawler based search engine which means that it 'crawls' the internet collecting keywords and references and people then search what it finds. Google then uses a complicated set of criteria to decide where sites come in their listings. The most significant of these is whether your site is linked to by other sites – see the section on linking strategies for more information on this. Other criteria are whether the search term appear in your in your domain name; in your title and description tags; in your headings; or elsewhere in the text of your page.
Whilst Google is the most popular search engine, it is worth remembering that there are lots of other search engines like Yahoo and Altavista and these use different logics. For example, other search engines – such as the Open Directory project are 'human powered' and take submissions from individuals and also have entries created by editors.
This section covers ways that you can improve the chances of your content being found through search engines. As different search engines have different logics for how they prioritise webpages it's useful to know how they work and what to focus on. It's always worth remembering that there are ways of buying placement on search engines like Google, but for most NGOs it's better to try and optimise your website so that your site gets placed higher up in the rankings without you having to do this.
If your organisation's website it being built by an outside contractor they may attempt to charge you extra for search engine optimisation however it won't take you long to submit your site to the main search engines. Building your organisations linking strategy requires specialist knowledge of your field, so as an insider you are probably best placed to do this.
You can submit your site to search engines at the following web addresses;
Metadata is a set of tags used to describe a web page. It provides information such as page author, creation date, what the page is about and which keywords represent the page's content. A web browser does not display metadata but the machines accessing the page can access and efficiently record data from it. Many search engines use metadata for the creation of their indexes.
Make sure each of the pages of your site contain the following
Title tag
This is the text that appears on web page title bars and search engine results pages. This should be about 60-80 characters.
Description
This is the short line of text that is displayed in the search results of most search engines. This shouldn't be more than 100-200 characters.
Keywords
Keywords and phrases need to be relevant to the content and separated by commas. Avoid repeating a keyword more than 3 times.
Alt tags
Including keywords in alt tags can help your search results.
Keywords - some words are better then others
Keywords are words that users enter into search engines to describe the information/service they are looking for. You should make sure that you find keywords for your site that are relevant to your organisation and the field you are working in – look through the online and offline content produced by your organisation to find inspiration for this.
You should be careful not to choose a lot of terms that are very generic as they may be a lot of websites out there using these terms and this may not help to make your content easily finable. Also you should ensure that you include words that are being used by your target audience in search engines – you can use website statistics to find this information.
There are some free tools out there to help you choose keywords;
Whether you create your organisation's site yourself or work with outside contractors you should aim to stick to the following guidelines;
Making your site accessible to a broad range of users – including those with disabilities – is not only good practice but can also improve your search engine listings and make your Web content more accessiblee to users in general.
The accessibility guidelines to follow are those created by the The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) which you can read online at http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/
There are many resources available online to help improve the accessibility of your site such as
http://wave.webaim.org/ which is a free web accessibility evaluation tool.
As well as optimising the way your website is programmed you should also ensure that your site is being linked to from other sites as this will boost your search rankings. In particular search engines are looking for links from reputable, high quality sites. If you want to find out how many sites are linking to your site just type link:www.yourwebsite.org into google. This will bring you back a page of details on who is linking to your site, you can use this to help identify organisations you already know that you could ask for links.
You can also try the following;
There is a lot of good information available on the internet, the following websites will help build your understanding of search engine optimisation.
http://www.idealware.org/articles/found_on_search_engines.php
A great article from Idealware – a leader in the NGO technology support field - which shows how “The content and structure of your website can have a dramatic effect on how easily potential constituents can find you via search engines.” Covers 10 steps that can help search engines find and prioritize your site content
http://www.idealware.org/articles/cms_for_seo.php
More information from Idealware on how to make sure the content management system used by your organisation to maintain your site is helping with your search engine optimisation.
http://seo.grassroots.org/guide
http://www.goodkeywords.com/
Good Keywords is a free Windows software for finding the perfect set of keywords for your web pages.
http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2167921
An in depth guide to search engine optimisation from one of the leading sites in this field
http://www.google.co.uk/webmasters/
This site offers inside knowledge on crawling and indexing issues and introduces offerings that can enhance and increase traffic to your site, and connect you with your visitors.
The most accurate way to measure the success of your website is look at your website's statistics and study of the behaviour of website visitors. This is a really helpful way of working out what you are already doing right, and what you could do better. The tools you use to do this are called web analytic tools. There are various free tools available for doing this including Google Analytics.
The most important information to examine is the number of visitors or unique visitors since this figure gives the most accurate impression of a site's audience.
The site analytics will also show you Hits, however this number is misleading since it can overestimate the popularity of a site, because it counts the loading of every item on a page not the viewing of a page overall.
Other information which your website statistics will offer are as follows
Referring search engines
Details on which search engines delivered traffic to the website.
Referring keywords
Details on keyword phrases that were used to find your site. If people are using keywords to search for your site that you aren't using in your site content or metadata (the keywords you use to describe your webpage), then you could use this information to identify new keywords to include in your site in the future.
Unique monthly visits
It is good practice to monitor this on a monthly basis and measure it against the number of search engine referrals, so you know if your traffic is coming from people who knew your site already or were looking for something on a search engine.
Site paths (entry and exists)
This shows how many users entered a site per page and how many left per page. This is useful to check the effectiveness of high-ranking web pages. For example if a particular page on your website, such as your homepage,is used 100 times as an entry page for your site and only 10 users clicked beyond that page, 90% of the possible visitors were lost.