Association Leadership - September/October 2007 - (Page 37)

Web Technology Getting Found Through I Web Searches By Reid Goldsborough site or business in a sentence or two, like this: You should repeat any keywords you used in headlines, subheads, titles and meta descriptions within the body of your site. Don’t do this too much, however, or it will be regarded as search engine spam and search engines may lower your rankings. Similarly, don’t load your pages with keywords in white or invisible text to try to boost your rankings as it may also backfire. directories but schemes solely designed to improve your site’s rankings. Being included in them can actually hurt your rankings. f a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? This old riddle might be updated for the information age: If you create a Web site and no one sees it, have you done anything? One old saw that isn’t necessarily true: If you build it, they will come. An entire industry has come into existence in recent years to help Web sites and the organizations behind them get noticed and entice visitors to come. Called search engine marketing (SEO), it targets search engines, which are how most people find Web sites, and Google most of all, since it’s the most popular search engine. If your business depends on the number of people and the right kind of people (buyers or clients) you attract to your Web site, you’re best off hiring an SEO professional. If your needs are less pressing, or if you’re a do-it-yourselfer, here are some general guidelines gleaned from talking with SEO pros and reading what they write. Three main things that you can do to improve your search engine results, in increasing order of importance, are coding your site properly, making sure other sites link to it and optimizing its content. CONTENT The best way to get found is providing great content. The following tips are from Larry Chase, publisher of Web Digest For Marketers, at http://wdfm.com. Provide value and usefulness, reasons for people to come to your site, return, tell others about it and link to it at their own Web sites. Flip the stereotypical marketing mindset on its head by thinking in terms of the needs of your site’s visitors, not your needs. Keep your content fresh and up to date. Visitors won’t come back if there’s nothing new to come back to. Make news. If you do something different with your site than similar sites, people will sit up and take notice. If you put out press releases about this, more people will sit up and take notice. When relevant include both major news media as well as trade publications in your field. Offer visitors an internal search tool to help them find the content they’re after, such as Pico Search, at www.picosearch. com. Stand out from similar sites through your site’s appearance as well as your voice, the stamp you or your organization places on your content that if done right is no less authentic than an individual’s personality. ◆ Reid Goldsborough is a syndicated columnist and author of the book Straight Talk About the Information Superhighway. He can be reached at reidgold@ netaxs.com or http://www.netaxs.com/ ~reidgold/column. LINKS Google’s breakthrough in generating relevant results was basing search rankings on sites linking to other sites. Sites are returned first that others sites link to, and the more sites that link to those sites, the more weight their links carry. So get your site linked to by other sites, particularly popular sites. You can do this yourself, or you can use automated tools, both free and fee. The single best open directory is DMOZ, at www.dmoz.com. Many other directories get their content from DMOZ. Its “Submitting Your Site” section is at www. dmoz.com/help/submit.html. Another useful site is SearchMonster, at www.searchmonster.org, which along with a directory offers techniques you can use to promote your site such as banner ads, link exchanges and Web reviews. Search Engine Colossus, at www. searchenginecolossus.com, points to directories in hundreds of other countries. Stay away, however, from “link farms,” which are Web sites that aren’t bona fide CODING Think of the search terms or phrases that people are most likely to type into Google to find sites such as yours. Those terms should be part of the headlines and subheads of your site (the text of your H1 and H2 tags) and your site’s title tags (the text in the section of a Web page between and ). You should also include a “meta description,” which also resides in the section, and which describes your September/October 2007 | Association LEADERSHIP 37 http://wdfm.com http://www.picosearch.com http://www.dmoz.com http://www.picosearch.com http://www.dmoz.com/help/submit.html http://www.dmoz.com/help/submit.html http://www.searchenginecolossus.com http://www.searchenginecolossus.com http://www.netaxs.com/~reidgold/column http://www.netaxs.com/~reidgold/column

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Association Leadership - September/October 2007

Contents Chairman's Column Homepage 60-Second Solutions An Interview with TSAE’s New Chairman TSAE’s Newest Board Members 7 Measures of Success Association Case Study: Diversity on the Board Assessing Your Association: Texas Nursery and Landscape Association TSAE's Annual Golf Tournament Between the Covers Now Online at TSAE.org – Association Leadership Magazine Getting Found Through Web Searches “I Survived a Year on a Committee!” New Members Community Spotlight San Antonio Mississippi Gulf Coast Index to Advertisers Board of Directors

Association Leadership - September/October 2007

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