Search engines, most notably Google, can direct a lot of traffic to your website, if you take care to make sure your site is "search engine-friendly."  There's a lot of misinformation about search engine optimization out there, though.  In this short article, we'll cut through the myths and try to give you a few, simple actions that will optimize a typical small nonprofit's website.

Let's start with the basics: only a few search engines are responsible for the overwhelming majority of web searches, with Google continuing to dominate the market.  In December 2007, the market share for search providers was:

Bottom line: make sure your site is Google-friendly, and don't sweat the other stuff too much.

Titles, Descriptions and Page Content Matter Most

The most important aspects of your page that search engines like Google pay attention to are:

• Your page's Title
• Your page's Description meta tag
• Your page's actual content/body text
  

So, if you have a page on your site that you want to be found when people search for "climate change" you would want to be sure to use the phrase "climate change" in the title of your page, in the text you write for the Description meta tag, and near the beginning of your page's actual body text.

What's this "Description meta tag" anyway?

Meta tags are HTML tags that appear in the code of your page, but are not part of the visible page content.  Search engines look at certain meta tags on your pages (and also ignore some!).  SearchEngineWatch has some great background on meta tags, if you're interested.

The Description meta tag is a short, paragraph-length summary of your page content.  For example, a page about climate change and polar bears might have a Description meta tag that reads "Climate change is causing tremendous harm to polar bears.  This document summarizes recent research on the effects of climate change on polar bear habitat."

How do I create Description meta tags?

Most modern content management systems, including Plone, which ONE/Northwest uses for all of its website consulting work, will automatically create a Description meta tag from the "Description" field of each content item. 

If you're not using a content management system, you will have to insert meta tags manually into your HTML documents.

Inbound Links Matter

Once you've made sure each page on your site has a keyword-rich title, description and body content, you may wish to think a bit about links. 

 Google's Webmaster Guidelines say:

Links help our crawlers find your site and can give your site greater visibility in our search results. When returning results for a search, Google combines PageRank (our view of a page's importance) with sophisticated text-matching techniques to display pages that are both important and relevant to each search. Google counts the number of votes a page receives as part of its PageRank assessment, interpreting a link from page A to page B as a vote by page A for page B. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

Something to think about: one reason blogs get a lot of traffic is because blog-style writing encourages lots of links to other blogs, thereby helping make blogs very visible on search engines.

What this means:  Google pays a lot of attention to the number of links from other sites to each of your pages.  Google pays more attention to links coming from "important" (e.g. popular) sites (e.g. major newspapers, widely read blogs), than to links that come from sites that are not already highly ranked.

In other words, encourage friends and allies to link to your site.  That helps your search engine ranking.  But be careful not to create pages entirely made of links -- Google can detect attempts to "game" their system, and may even penalize your site's ranking.  Focus on encouraging folks to link in the flow of their content.

How to get links?  Write focused, relevant, useful content!

The most effective way to get inbound links (and visitors!) is to write focused, relevant, interesting content that is grounded in your organization's unique expertise.

Your goal should be to become the expert resource for a particular topic. Example: Search for "native plants" in Google. Washington Native Plant Society comes in at #3 (just below the California NPS). Why? Because they have a ton of quality information, not simply because they were clever with meta tags.

Link with Keywords, Not "Click Here"

One of the simplest methods for increasing page relevancy is to use keywords as hyperlinks to other pages within your site. For example, instead of a link like:

click here to learn more about search optimization

a far more effective method would be:

learn more about search optimization

Useful Background Reading

• Google's Webmaster Guidelines
• Google's article "How Can I Create a Google-Friendly Site?"
• How can I use meta tags to give Google additional information about my site?
• Vertical Response article on backlinking
  
• How to use HTML Meta Tags
  
• Search Engine Features for Webmasters