Getting Noticed on the Net- Web Site Registration
5 September 2005 at 1:09 pm
Have you “Googled’ your Not for Profit and found that it doesn’t appear on the search results? Or are you relegated to page seventeen among thousands of competing sites?
Correctly registering a Not for Profit with major search engines and web directories is the way to get noticed on the Net!
It’s well known that Google is one of the most popular world wide search engines followed by Yahoo, AOL and AltaVista.
A US Not for Profit called Groundspring.org is dedicated to improving the way other NFP’s access and use the Internet and has produced a hand book which includes an entire chapter on driving traffic to your website and search engine registration.
Groudspring.org says getting listed with Web directories is straightforward, because they are set up to accept listing submissions from people and organisations that are launching sites.
To get listed on these all you have to do is visit these Web directories and follow the instructions on their home page:
– Yahoo –
http://www.yahoo.com/info/suggest/
– Excite –
http://www.excite.com/info/add_url/
– Starting Point –
http://www.stpt.com/submit/submit.asp
And according to Groundspring.org one important piece of advice is to revisit all these Web directories and update your listings twice a year or when you do a major overhaul of your site.
That way you can either improve the listing description or identify new listing categories that you fit into.
But in the case of Google, Groundspring.org says that getting listed with search engines is far more challenging, because these Web sites don’t accept listing submissions.
Instead, they have built highly sophisticated software robots called “spiders” that surf the Web constantly, looking for new and updated content to add to their search databases.
Groundspring.org says getting top listings is also very hard for several reasons. If someone searches for “pollution” or “hunger,” they are going to find tens of thousands of pages dealing with these terms.
It’s unlikely your site is going to be in the first page of listings, especially because there are probably dozens or hundreds of other sites with more information on these topics than yours.
In addition, some commercial sites may be paying to be listed more prominently.
Groundspring.org says that to get listed appropriately with a search engine, you must install meta tags on all the Web pages of your site.
Meta tags are keywords and short descriptions of your content that are coded into your page and not visible to the naked eye. (To view meta tags on a specific Web page, open the page in your browser, select View/Source in Internet Explorer or View/Page Source in Netscape.)
Meta tags will help you maximise your search engine placement and assure that people can find you using key words that match the content of your web site. You’ll want to create and maintain a list of meta tag keywords that covers all the issues that you work on.
Meta tags need to be installed in the html header coding for your Home Page.
Here’s a US example of how that coding looks for the National Council of La Raza, an organisation working to improve life opportunities for Hispanic Americans:
Groundspring.org recommends that NFP’s regularly update their Web directory listings and meta tags, and don’t agonise about search result placement.
It says that your real challenge is not merely to bring new traffic to your web site, but encouraging visitors to return again and again.
If you would like to download the free Online Fundraising Handbook in PDF format from Groundspring.org which includes the chapter on Driving Traffic to Your Site, go to: www.groundspring.org/learningcenter/.
