Thursday, October 4, 2007

Websites 101: Making Your Website Findable

By Ben Delaney © 2007

We all know that our website is important. But do we know how to make it really work for us?


I’ve got a website (two actually). You’ve got a website. Everybody ‘cept Granny has a website. But have you ever asked, why?

There are a lot of good reasons to have an organizational website. It has become a requirement of a serious business, replacing the once-ubiquitous yellow pages ad with a colorful, ever-changing multimedia extravaganza. That’s the website bottom line: We exist.

But there are many more reasons to have a website, and a good website can be a tremendous booster for your organizations. I’ll cover the basics quickly, then talk about a few advanced techniques that can really improve the ROI on your website. There are two main issues relating to a successful website: getting people to it, and keeping them there. In this article, I’m talking about how to get people to your website. In a later one, I’ll talk about keeping them there, what is called the “stickiness” of the site.

Like the front page of a newspaper, your website needs to include the Five W’s – or links to them. If you ever took a journalism class, you recall that the five W’s are:

  • Who: Who we are, “Allied Rooster Breeders of Tulsa”
  • What: What we do, “We assure the purity of rooster bloodlines by maintaining records. We also produce events that enable the rooster breeding community to meet, do business, and socialize.”
  • Why: The reason we exist, “Rooster breeders have long needed a voice, and a standards board.”
  • When: Not always appropriate, but this could mean, “Since 1841”, or “We protect rooster breeders 24 hours a day.” Your call.
  • Where: Where are you located and where do you work, “Contact us at this address, email, or phone number,” or, “We serve rooster breeders in the Tulsa River Valley area.”

Hitting each of the five W’s on your home page will enable visitors to know immediately where they are and why. Then they will need to know how to find the information they came for, using what is called the Site Navigation. Another key element, your site navigation includes:

  • The buttons and links that take visitors to various items and pages. These should be easy to read, and ideally should provide audio or visual feedback when used.
  • A menu that is obvious, and takes people where they want to go as quickly as possible. Don’t get too cute with the menu. Especially as the population of over-40’s increases, you need a menu that is easy to find and not challenging to use.
  • The site navigation is based on a logical and shallow hierarchy of information and pages, so that it is quickly apparent how to find things. Try to make your site organization shallow – more wide than deep. By that, I mean that you don’t want to build a site that forces a user to click after click after click after click to find what she wants. Many rich sites are only three or four clicks deep. To build a shallow site, make your second levels large and scalable. For example, you may have only two programs now, but your programs page could have room for ten.
  • Have a site search function. Google offers a free site search widget, as do several other companies. You can customize the look and limit search to your site, or the entire internet. Having a search function makes it really easy for visitors to find a name, date, place, or other bit of information that could take hours to find any other way. Having a search box is just being a good neighbor.
  • Finally, site navigations should always include a site map, detailed to at least the second level of your site. I believe that a site map should provide a primary navigation for visitors who want to go directly to a bit of information. A site map to the third level will cover a lot of pages, and enable quick navigation.

Back to “Why”


Once you build a website with all of the five W’s and good navigation, your basic internet version of the yellow pages ad, you may have looked at it and thought, “We still have infinite room. How do we fill it?” This is when the “Why?” question must be faced.

Ideally, you addressed “why” before you started. But it is better to have your internet shingle hung out than not to exist in cyberspace. Let’s talk about “why” now.

By “why”, I mean, what do you want your website to do for the organization? We have the basic function: we exist. Now you can use your website to fulfill a number of missions of different sorts. Here are a some of the most frequently seen:

  • Most organizations have a lot of information they are trying to get out to people – their sites have a library function.
  • We all have seen online shopping sites. Many organizations sell books and other merchandise using an online store.
  • Nonprofits typically rely on donations. Those organizations have a donation processing system.
  • If an organization produces events, or provides classes, it would benefit from an online registrations system.
  • And by the way, you’ll need a calendar of those events. Integration with common downloadable and online calendars is a nice calendar bonus.
  • People flock to nonprofits for the communities that form around them. Make it easy for your community to meet and talk by including Web 2.0 features like a video upload section, blogs, text message delivery, podcasts, and other items your community will find useful.
  • People have questions and suggestions. To give them quick answers, you provide a FAQ, a page of Frequently Asked Questions, and their answers. To help visitors find people, add a complete list of staff and provide email links and/or phone numbers. Also provide a contact/feedback form that makes it easy for visitors to get in touch with you.
  • Most importantly, most organizations have a program of activities in which visitor can participate. A detailed explanation of what your program comprises, including when and where it occurs, who it is best suited for, what it costs and why people should attend. (There’s those five W’s again.)

What should the home page of our website include? What should it look like? Those are among the most asked questions whenever I help people work on their websites. Everybody has an idea, everybody wants to put the most important programs front and center. What makes this a real conundrum is that there is seldom an easy answer to this question.

There are crowded websites, like Craig’s List and Idealist.org that have every inch covered with text or pictures. Those are portals: like an airport, once you enter the gate, you have many destination options. Other sites make more use of white space, and direct your eyes to a few, very important words or images. Google’s site is an extreme example of this.

There is no good rule for deciding how much goes on your home page except say what you need to say, and nothing more. The design should never detract from your message and should keep your community and constituencies in mind. If you work with a lot of over-40 people, keep the type size fairly large.

On being seen


So you’ve had a beautiful website built, everyone agrees that it is a work of art, and easy to use. Now, how do you get people to see it?

I have been surprised several times by people who launch their first website and then, a week alter, ask me why they are not getting many visitors. Well, it goes like this. When a website is first published, it can take several weeks for the search engines to find it. It can then take days more before the site is listed in search results. And unless you have a very prominent site, it will be way down in those results. So, the likelihood of a new site being found immediately by lots of people is very low.

But all is not lost. There are several techniques to improve search engine ranking (how near the top you are) and to use search engines to draw visitors to your site. The first is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and the second, Search Engine Marketing (SEM). Both are key to successful internet marketing. I’ll talk about SEO in this chapter, and address SEM in a later edition.

SEO is intended to make it easy for the search engines to find your site and recognize its content. There are several factors that can make or break your site in regard to search engines:
  • Don’t get too flashy. Flash is a technology that allows a great amount of freedom for web designers. It makes really nice, fancy transitions, like fading pictures with sound effects, and it display animations and video. But Flash has a big drawback. The content of a Flash animation cannot be read by search engines. Sites that rely heavily on Flash must go to extraordinary lengths to be indexed properly for search. If you use Flash go easy. And be sure to use the other tools I talk about here.
  • Use meta tags: Meta tags are information your web pages include that helps them be displayed properly and found and indexed for searching. There are three key meta tags every site should use. They are:
    • Title: The title appears on the top of the browser window when your pages are displayed. It should say something meaningful. “Welcome to our home page” is NOT meaningful. A good title will describe the page contents very briefly, and include your organization name. A good title might be, “Why Roosters Are Important – Allied Rooster Breeders of Tulsa,” or “Meet the Board of Directors -- Allied Rooster Breeders of Tulsa.”
    • Description: This meta tag contains just what it says, a brief description of your site. This will appear when people bookmark your website, and is used by search engines to help categorize your site. Take some time to write a good, short description, and then add it to every page of your site. If you like, each page can have a unique description.
    • Keywords: Keywords are the simple words and phrases that describe your site. Think of how you would search for your site on Google or Yahoo. Those words should be your keywords. While some search engines are moving away from a reliance on keywords, some still use them. I like to have a basic set of keywords that are used on every page, along with a group for each page that focuses on that page’s content.

  • Remember those five W’s. You recall the five W’s we talked about earlier. Be sure that each of them is on your home page. They don’t have to be large or prominent – you might have your contact information in a very small font at the bottom of the page. But search engines read your pages, and build their indices based on what they read. It is absolutely essential that you home page contain enough information that the search engine knows what it is reading, and what it means. And by the way, your visitors will find your site more easily, and when they get there, they will find it more useful.
  • Have a machine readable site map. A somewhat recent development, a machine-readable site map is an XML file placed in the root directory as your website. Now that sounds a bit technical, and it is. But your webmaster will understand how to build and where to put your XML site map. Search engines use these site maps to understand the structure and content of your website. They will help ensure that your site is cataloged correctly, and result in better search results. Use them.
  • Use a submission service: Submission services automate the process of telling search engines about your website. I like them when things have changed dramatically, and when I launch a new site. I also use them every year or so to help keep my listings fresh. I have never spent more than $50 for a submission service, and don’t recommend that you do either. These services send your site information to about a dozen search engines. So, while Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL have about 90% of the search market, a submission services will get you them, plus another 7-8%. It’s not worth a lot, but it is worth something.
  • Exchange links: Look for the sites of organizations that are similar, but not competitive with yours. See if they offer a resource page with external links. If they do, offer to trade links with them. You show theirs and they show yours. It makes your site look stronger to search engines when more external sites point to your pages. And it will help you and your sister organizations do better by providing a richer user experience.

That’s it for Search Engine Optimization. Using these techniques I have increased website traffic dramatically,. You can do the same. In a later chapter, I’ll talk about Search Engine Marketing, the flip side of adding value to your website, and website stickiness, the science of keeping people on your site longer.

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