What is SE not O

May 12th, 2008

The bad old days of paying top dollar to designers who were more interested in their “creative vision” than your needs to build you a site that few people ever saw because it was on page 13 of most search results, which you turned out to be thankful for because it quickly became stale because it was so expensive and such a hassle to update.

There was nothing optimal about that!

Other than that, the old days were great!

SEO, blogs, Google, and the Beatles

May 12th, 2008

The best news of all

Once you start building your blog, you’ll start rising in the search results.

Google has changed the way most of us use the Internet. Even if I know the web address I am looking for, I often use Google to search for the site so I don’t have to type the whole thing in.

Recently, the minds at Google realized that when you search for things, you want what’s real, current, and reliable. So, they have given priority to dated blog content in sorting out the search results they show you. That means, if your blog post title includes the key words of someone’s search, your post may end up very near the top of the search results.

So, each blog post becomes like a very specific bread crumb for your potential clients, customers, or donors to find. With a blog post, they see what they’ve searched for, and all your key information surrounds what they are reading. I recently wrote a post about understanding financial statements and drew a parallel to the Beatles song Let It Be. Within minutes of publishing that post, I searched on financial statements Beatles, and was amazed to find my blog entry #1 in the Google results. See where it is now.

The key is, clearly, writing very specific articles that include words your audience might be interested in seeing. Your current staff and volunteers are the perfect ones to help create this content as they ARE your audience. They share interests and use the same words.

Of course, your staff are probably not professional writers or photographers. I suggest forming an editorial committee that drafts and periodically enforces (by weekly review) standards for your organization. This will allow the rules to be generated by the people in charge and also by the creators of content, who may have a more nuanced sense of what will work and won’t.

If you really want to get wild, ask your customers or your wider community to create content for you!

Definition of SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

May 12th, 2008

SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization

Search Engines are sites like Google or Yahoo that help you find what you are looking for on the internet.

You type in search words into a box and send that to the Search Engine’s servers, which are like a huge index to the internet. They run some very fancy processes (algorithms) to figure out what might be of interest to you, sort the most most interesting things up to the top of the list, and send a “search results” page back to your computer.

The optimization part comes in when you build your site so that Google’s servers find it easy to read, understand, and prioritize your web pages that might relate to search terms of interest to your potential clients, investors, donors, etc.

Being on page one of the search results for terms that matter to your best customers is the goal.

Web site not showing up (or low ranking) on Google or other search engines?

May 12th, 2008

Word press and other blog software can feed right into Google’s new page ranking system.

Recently, the minds at Google decided that when you search, you don’t want to see what the most people have linked to, that’s probably stale, you want to see pages that:

1. Are recent
2. Have your search words right in the URL.
3. Have your search words in the text of the page.

The beautiful thing is that WordPress, and other blog software, gives you the option to not only create key word rich urls with every post (notice what the url is for this page! It includes the words web, site, Google, search, engine, ranking. No extra work, but a lot of extra attention by rising in the rankings.

Learn more about leaving crumbs around the internet here.

What is SEO
What is SE not O
Other benefits of blogs