Search engine optimisation
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;
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