Six Steps to Optimizing Your Web Site for Search Engines

When someone searches a search engine on a word related to your cause, the search engine lists the sites it feels are most important and likely to be the best on a topic. Search engine optimization is all about polishing your Web site so that it appears high in search engine results.

In the Idealware webinar "Optimizing Your Web site for Search Engines" in June, presenter Laura Quinn, director of Idealware, discussed the basics of search engine optimization, tips for creating a site search engines can find and ensuring a search-friendly site architecture.

Quinn recommended the following six steps to optimizing your site:

1. Create a site worth finding.
A great, meaty site will naturally include lots of great keywords, inspire people to link to your content, get you more publicity (and thus more links), help you deliver on your mission, and turn more visitors into friends.

Keep your site fresh with new information. Frequent new content encourages search engines to index your site more frequently, and you move up in the ranks of how often search engines come to index your site. If nothing changes on your site, search engines get bored of you and stop indexing as often.  

2. Encourage others to link to you.
Search engines find you through links. If no one links to your site, it's unlikely that the search engines will find you. Create content that inspires links. What can you create that's so good people want to link to it?

To find out whether your site is indexed, search your organization name by doing a Google search of your organization's URL. This will show you all the pages that Google knows of from your domain.

A good place to start, Quinn said, is getting linked by large directories, e.g., www.dmoz.org. But any site that's ranked highly itself is just as good, as the higher the linking site is ranked for relevant keywords, the better. Ask partners to link to you, and look for geographic or subject-matter directories.

3. Choose keywords for your site.
Search engines index your site based on keywords that match up to keywords people are searching on. Therefore, it's important to identify high-priority keywords for your organization. Start with the phrases associated with your organization, e.g., its name; if you're locally focused, your location and variations on your location; names of your programs; and common search strings people will use to find you.

Come up with variations of your keywords, and don't forget alternative spellings or even misspellings.

"Think about all of the synonyms and various ways one might think about you," she said.

Good tools for brainstorming keywords include sites like Good Keywords and Wordtracker. Quinn recommended optimizing your site for a couple keywords per high-priority page.

Prioritize:

• keywords that get higher traffic
• more specific keywords, which will be easier for you to "own" on search engines
• keywords that will help people find pages that are high priority for you.

4. Place keywords in prime locations.
Incorporate keywords into the text of your pages. Remember, images don't count when it comes to search engines. Prioritize headers on your pages that are larger and more prominently colored, as search engines look to text in header tags before they look to prominently featured text. Sheer quantity also helps, Quinn said, but don't forget to communicate and inspire visitors to action.

"It's a balancing act between the quality of information on the page and keywords used," Quinn said.

Include keywords in:

• URLs, if possible, so that URLs can be read and understood.
• Metadata. Page title metadata appears in the blue bar at the top of browsers. When a search is done on Google for a keyword, the searcher will see the page title and often the metadata description of a page.
• Link text. Use your keywords to link to your own pages, and encourage others to do the same. Create titles that are friendly to link to to encourage people to use those rather than write their own text for links to your site.
• Image alt tags. These get thrown into the pot as keywords for your site and can help get your images on Google Images.

5. Ensure a search-friendly site architecture.
Have a simple link to each page on your site. Spiders can't follow JavaScript or drop-down menus. Linking to a sitemap from your homepage can help.

Quinn also recommended avoiding multiple URLs for the same page.

She also suggested using standard H1 and H2 header tags, if possible, as they get higher priority than custom styles. Go with <h2>Voices</h2> rather than <div id="subheader">voices</div>. And try not to have huge amounts of HTML (for navigation, for example) before visitors even get to the page text, as keywords that appear early in the HTML are prioritized.

6. Consider Google Ads.
Quinn said you get a lot of control with Google Ads and very detailed reports. You can create your ad, define your keywords and decide how much you want to pay. She also recommended applying for a Google Grant online at www.google.com/grants for thousands of dollars of free Google Ads, which are granted based on vetting rather than a competitive process.

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