Is Your Institute on Top?

Published on Monday, December 01, 2008
ARTICLES

Your institute's best solutions to a failing education system or a "health care crisis" will never take hold if nobody finds these solutions. With websites playing an increasing role in how people get their information, it is important to have a well-honed Search Engine Optimization plan for online projects. SEO is how you get your information placed well on search engines such as Yahoo or Google.

The goal of SEO is to leave few website visits to chance. The content of the page and links to the page are optimized for very specific keywords and phrases. In the example of health care, if it's the Show-Me Institute, it might want to target the terms "health care reform Missouri." To make this happen, the SMI staff must work together with online activists and bloggers to get references to its research on as many websites as possible. This will cause the Institute's site to rank higher in search engine results.

Determining the best words and phrases to use is as simple as learning about the following terms and free online tools that support SEO.

Google Webmaster Tools: These tools provide you with detailed reports about the visibility of your pages on Google.

Google Analytics: Free web-statistics analysis software that assists you in making search engine optimization decisions, investment assessments and messaging goals.

XML Sitemap: A file on your website that will help search engines find your content and increase your overall site size and stature, which will cause your site to move up in search engine results.

Landing Page: The page that appears when a user clicks on an advertisement or a search-engine result link.

Google Dance: The period of time when Google indices are tailored for search results. This will often cause both a fluctuation in index size as well a significant change in a website's search-result position

Google Trends: From Google Labs, this tool shows the most popularly searched terms from the beginning of 2004 to the present.

Key Word Utilities: Research tools that give insight as to which keywords work and which do not.

Of course, the above terms and tools applied without a strategy will not get your SEO plan under way. Leslie Graves of the Lucy Burns Institute has developed a great training course for planning and targeting your SEO. (Write her at lbgraves@aol.com for details.) Naturally, the authors are happy to talk with SPN members about how to get more "Google Juice" to their organization's website.

For additional ideas on how to get your SEO plan up and running, visit SPN's New Media Mania webpage,
lts.spn.org. Updated on a monthly basis with articles and links, this is your online resource for Web 2.0 and New Media information.

Joe Weaver is the technology guru and Nicole Williams is the management and technology advisor at SPN. Write them at weaver@spn.org and williams@spn.org, respectively.