Getting your website noticed
Choosing the right address
Ideally your potential audience should be able to find you
easily by your website address. Choose one that is that is
memorable and easy to guess, e.g. mediatrust.org rather than
The Media Trust.org
You might want to buy pertinent domain names, e.g. .org,
.org.uk, .co.uk, or variations on a name, e.g. mediatrust,
media-trust, themediatrust. This will ensure that you own
the variations and other organisations can't use them, thus
reducing the chance of confusion.
Search engines
People may also find your site through keywords in a search
engine. To make the most of this you need to put as much information
into your website as possible:
- Ensure all pages have titles.
- Register your website with search engines as people do
not search for your URL only.
- Update that registration on a regular basis (usually
monthly).
Research a target list of keywords or phrases. What are the
likeliest words someone would use if they were looking for
you?
Site submission
Search engines will not necessarily find your site automatically.
You need to be proactive and register your site with different
search engines. Submission services are available but they
can be expensive - 72% of submitters do it manually.
Each engine has a different submission process. For example,
Yahoo screen each submission for individual merit. The time
it takes for your site to get registered can vary significantly
between search engines, ranging from a few days to over four
weeks.
Persistence is key. Keep monitoring where your site appears
on search engines. If drastic changes occur, try to find out
why. Try to keep abreast of developments in the strategies
search engines use when listing sites.
Meta tags
Meta tags contain information about a web page which is
hidden when viewed with a web browser. They contain keywords
and descriptions of the content of a page. This information
is used by search engines to rank sites.
In the early days of the internet they were crucial. Now,
however some search engines don't support them. But it is
still important to identify relevant key words for each page
on your site, and a succinct description.
Links to other websites
The number of links to your site is particularly important
to popular engines such as Google and Northern Light. Major
search engines count the number of visible links to your site
as a measure of its popularity and adjust its ranking accordingly.
Developing a linking strategy is vital to ensure a higher
ranking. Ask relevant sites to link with you.
Keywords
The placement of keywords is important in page titles and
in the first paragraph. Search engines have different conventions:
- Some engines like keywords to be mentioned four or five
times.
- Others look for keywords up to eight times.
- Some prefer keywords to be in the last paragraph.
Search engine characteristics
Don't be tempted to cheat! Increasingly people try and cheat
search engines through a number of methods: page cloaking,
keyword cloaking, or false use of keywords. However, search
engines are catching up with this and discovery could lead
to search engines removing you from their listings.
Handy resources
There are companies out there who help with search engine
optimisation:
Find out more about other campaigning issues and examples
in the In more depth section.
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