Finding Your Site on the Web Better Practices

Source: The Canadian Association newsletter - Sept 2002 issue - published by Association Xpertise Inc. - www.axi.ca/tca

TIPS, TOOLS & RESOURCES

Better Practices

The practices described in this area are described as Better Practices for a very good reason. We have a great deal of difficulty with the term best practices used in any other context than to refer to the results of benchmarking exercises involving real and relevant organizations with tangible results. We offer Better Practices related to areas where we feel that change is needed in associations. The Better Practices are intended to provoke thought, and to encourage organizations to think about what they are doing and how they are doing it.

Finding Your Site on the Web

With your organization’s investment in its web site, it is important to ensure your web site is found by those in your constituency and on topics important to your organization. It is not acceptable for your site to be simply an on-line brochure that only gets visited by people that you have already had contact with.

In exploring the search aspect of the web, the benchmark is Google (see sidebar below). All of the tips below contribute to improving your web site’s search engine results.

Tips:

Identify and include relevant meta tags in pages on your site.
Register directly with 4-6 of the leading general search engines and directories.
Register with targeted directories and search engines specific to your audience.
Place free and paid links on key sites relevant to your audience.
Produce a valuable e-newsletter for constituents, preferably in HTML format.
Focus on content, content, content…..and content.
Forget about the home page Flash movie.
Monitor your statistics on search engine keywords used to access your site.
Keep your site current, and that means updating it regularly.
Include surveys, reports, etc. that deliver valuable content to visitors.

What Can be Accomplished

Association Xpertise Inc.’s web site (www.axi.ca) was launched in May 2001. One year later, AXI’s web site is the top search result on Google when searching Canadian sites using key search criteria such as “association management” and “association consultant”, and within the top half-dozen search results for secondary criteria, such as “non-profit consultant” and “non-profit management”.

When using Google to search all sites (including American sites), AXI shows up within the top ten search results for “association consultant” and “association management”.

The value of this accomplishment can be better understood after reading the following sidebar article on Google.

Sidebar

Excerpt from Sage for our times: Search engine of choice usurps its competition

Source: Calgary Herald, Monday, July 22, 2002 edition

Three-and-a-half-year-old Google has become the search engine of choice on the Internet. It has usurped old favourites such as Alta Vista, Infoseek and even the venerable Yahoo.

Google's secret: it uses the Web's vast link structure as a gauge of a page's worth. It interprets a link from page A to page B as, essentially, a vote by page A for page B. The more votes, the higher the ranking. And votes from important pages weigh more heavily.

It has more Web pages indexed than any other search engine -- SearchEngineWatch .com estimates 1.5 billion fully read plus another half-billion pages with which it's acquainted through its trademark link analysis. Google itself claims an index of 3 billion pages out of the Web's roughly 8 billion pages.

This compares to 625 million indexed for AllTheWeb, 550 for Alta Vista and 390 for Northern Light, according to Sullivan's last study at the end of 2001.

Google also is the Net's most-used search engine. While more people visit MSN and Yahoo than Google, they stay on Google longer and return more often, says SearchEngineWatch.com, using research provided by Jupiter Media Metrix.

Google users spent an average of 24.1 minutes per search at their favourite search engine, compared to 18 minutes for Alta Vista, 16.2 minutes for Ask Jeeves and 10.7 minutes for Yahoo.

Furthermore, Google led in total search hours per month with 11.7, following by Yahoo with 6.5 hours, Ask Jeeves with 4.8 hours, MSN, Microsoft's site, with four hours, America Online with 2.9 and Alta Vista with 1.9 hours per month.