 Welcome to How to Think Like a Search Engine, Optimizing Your Content, Marketing, and Communications for SEO. My name is Becky Wiegand and I'm the Webinar Program Manager here at TechSoup Global. I've been with the organization for 7 years this month and prior to that spent a decade working for small nonprofits in Washington D.C. and Oakland, California. I'm happy to be your host for today's event and hope that I'll actually learn quite a bit today too because SEO is a topic that's near and dear to many of our hearts and as we hope to be found and heard and discovered by supporters and potential supporters across channels on the web. Our presenter for today is James Metzger who is a Marketing Operations Professional by Trade. And he's currently working with TechSoup as our Online Marketing and Analytics Manager. So we're happy to have somebody in-house to share expertise with you. We pride ourselves in having a global name with TechSoup and getting out our message to an audience around the world. And James has been helping us do that. He has a flair for increasing business results through the application of empathetic design, employee training, and documenting processes that positively impact the search engine results for the web property. So you'll get to hear a bit about how to do that best at your own organization from him. I've also mentioned on the back end Allie Bezdikian who is going to be chatting with you and capturing your questions. She is our Interactive Events and Video Producer at TechSoup. So say hi to her on the back end and feel free to reach out to her if you need help at any time. We are all here in TechSoup's headquarters office in San Francisco. Go ahead and chat in to let us know where you're joining from today. We have about 130 people in the room right now and that number will continue to climb. I've got folks chiming in Alberta, Detroit, LA, Seattle, Philadelphia, Reno, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Wisconsin, Minnesota, all over the country. Welcome and we're glad to have you. Looking at the agenda for today we'll do a quick introduction of TechSoup and we'll have an opportunity to do a couple of polls that gauges your experience with working with SEO. And then James will launch us into the topic at hand with what is SEO, why does it matter. He'll talk about how search engines read webpages, give us some specifics to look at on how search engines really look at your copy so that you can be more conscientious and intentional about the copy you use on your website. Then we'll take some time to look at some live site examples that many of you during registration checked off that you would like to have your site potentially reviewed. So we went ahead and picked a couple of those to review live on the line. And then we'll give an SEO style guide that you can take with you. We'll have time for Q&A so ask the questions as they come to you. So TechSoup Global, we are a network globally of 63 partner NGOs working in more than 120 countries around the world to provide you with technology knowledge and resources to better meet your mission. You can learn about what we do in our 2014 year in review. We know these links on the screen cannot be clicked on during the webinar, but you'll have those available to you in that slide deck later today or in that reminder you received an hour ago. Like I mentioned, we are working in 63 partner countries around the world and we have local meetup groups in 41 places, those green dots on the screen that you can see all over the place. So if there's one near you, definitely check out NetSquare to see if you've got one that you can connect with locally. We are serving more than 615,000 NGOs around the world. And one of the things you're probably more familiar with is our product donation program which has served people to the tune of nearly $5 billion in product donations and grants. You can find out more about TechSoup's programs at TechSoup.org. So on with the show we would love you to chime in to tell us our great participants today. Have you, and feel free to check off as many of these apply to you, have you purchased a domain name? And this is you personally, not your organization, but you. Have you built a site using that domain name? Have you been the content writer or creator? Have you been the web developer or publisher? Maybe you filled all of those roles. Maybe you haven't done any of them and that's okay too. Or if there's something else you'd like to let us know, feel free to chat it in the comments. And this will help us as your host and presenter today get a feel for the audience's level of experience and may dictate a little bit about how much time we spend on some of the basics versus more advanced topics. We want to make sure that this is going to best serve your needs. So go ahead, I'm going to give just a few more seconds for you to participate in that and then I'll show the results live. Thanks for all of you telling us where you're joining from. We know you can't see all of the questions and comments coming in chat. So if there are comments that are shared that we think are useful to share out with everyone else, we'll go ahead and do that throughout the webinar, but know that we're reading them on the back end. So I'm going to show the results, but you can continue to vote. So it looks like nearly 40% of our audience has done all of the above. So that's a good chunk of our audience that has done all of those different roles. The great majority have been content writers or creators at some point. And about 14% have not done any of the above. So I think that's an interesting – we have some folks that are maybe brand new to the various pieces of this. One more survey question for you that will help us inform the direction we take. How well does your site perform when you search for it? Does it show up on the first page of Google results? Maybe it shows up in the top three Google pages. Does it show up when your organization's name or brand is not used? So if you're not actually searching by name and you're searching by the subject or topic that you work on or the cause, does it show up after many pages of Google results? Or maybe you don't have any idea because you haven't actually searched for it. So go ahead and tell us what you think about that. And if you have comments, feel free to chat those in as well. Quite a few people saying that they have no idea, which is not uncommon. We get busy with our day-to-day work and it's hard to do some ego googling around our organization if it's not part of our job. So I'm going to go ahead and give just a couple more seconds to let everybody chime in. And so some people are commenting that their site shows up on the first results of Google search if it's got their organization name in it. And we see that there's a much lower percentage that have that show up. Maybe you show up in search not on the first page when you're not using your organization's name or brand. So this is interesting, 60%. So that sounds like many of you are on the right track and that's great to hear. But hopefully today our expert joining us on the line here in just a second, James Metzger, will share some other tips and ideas and copy suggestions that will help you improve it even more, especially as these algorithms change and we talk about things like mobile get-in where Google changes the rules on us at times. So I'd like to go ahead and welcome James to the program. Thank you so much for joining us today. Take it away. Thanks Becky. Thanks so much for the kind introduction, running the polls, and welcome to everyone who decided to attend today and learn a little bit more about thinking like a search engine and optimizing your site that you'll have the results you desire when marketing online. One of my favorite things about using search engine optimization for marketing for nonprofits is that it's really one of the most cost effective ways to reach the people that are looking for you. And it's really just a matter of trying to align what you're presenting to the search engines in alignment with what people are searching for or what they're seeking and how to get to you. So one thing I like to remind people is Pablo Picasso's quote, computers are useless. They can only give you answers. And the reason I reference that quote is because oftentimes we think of search engines like a very smart computer that can somehow figure things out on its own. And the fact of the matter is that it's only like any other computer is going to be able to regurgitate what you tell it. So I want to talk a little bit about how that information gets into the search engine indexes and disease and how you can help best align what people are searching for so that your presentation from the website, from the inside out is a better mirror of what people are seeking so that the search engine in between the seeker and the object of their search is able to best align that relationship. So one thing we need to think about is that today we talk about multimedia websites and content rich websites and things like that. What I'm going to focus on today are some specific basically text language oriented parts of your website. There are ways to optimize sites for all the rich media that we like to see in a website and enjoy as part of the user experience. But just a reminder that as far as search engines go basically we're still focusing mainly on text. HTML and XML are very text heavy languages. But as far as pictures go or different kinds of scripts there's a lot of different ways to build a website. And many of these ways hide the information from the search engines that we think we're making available. So just a reminder that a web browser interprets the web code and puts it into a visual presentation that a human with eyes can see and understand. But that's the web browser doing some work for us. The search engine bot that scans your site doesn't have eyes. It's just going to read and file things away. So just a reminder there we'll get into more details on this later. So in keeping that idea going we need to think about what a search engine does. So what a search engine does is it's going to crawl your site. And by that I mean it's going to read your site's code. It can't interpret or infer or extrapolate. It only is going to be able to read exactly what you put in front of it. After it gets done crawling your site it's going to index your site. So what that means is it's going to make a really big database of things that are important to the search bot about your site. And that index also contains all that same information about all the other websites in the world, the people that you're competing with, the people that you're partnered with. So it's just a big database of some specific items. And we'll give you a little view into what that might look like. The third thing a search engine does is it presents SERPs. So I'm going to use that acronym frequently today maybe. If you haven't heard it before it's a search engine result page. And we just think of that as when I go to a search engine I type in what I want into the search box and hit the enter key. That page that shows up as the result, that's the search engine result page. So in order to present the SERP all the search engine is doing is comparing what is being searched for against that big database, that index of all the other websites. And it's just going to try and come back with answers that best align the search to the index. So the trick is to get your page to tell the search engine the right things in the right format. So you've got to speak that language with the search engine. So this next slide is something that we can think of as what the index of that the search bot is catching for one site might look like. So for every website you've got a list of URLs. Those are all the pages that your website consists of. You've got the pictures and in columns and rows it breaks down your entire website into specific areas and specific criteria. So for one particular URL, your home page you could have 50 different things about that home page that are important to the search engine. The page title, the title length, pixel width, and we'll get into those details a little more. But I just kind of wanted to give you a visual impression of what the search bot or the index is going to look and record your website as which is much different than what we see it visually. And I'm sorry this is such a small slide and small text. Later on when I do some live analysis of some people that volunteered their sites we'll see a bigger version of this. So the takeaway right now is that there's a lot of little rows and columns of information and it's all text based. So let's talk a little bit about what specifics are related to copy for SEO. And by copy I mean that's what you're writing about your nonprofit, your service, and how it's going to relate to search engine optimization. There are literally hundreds of different factors that go into the placement of a site and a SERP. So the ones that I'm focused on are what we call on-page optimization. It's mostly related to specific text copy that you're writing. It is not going – this presentation is not going to get into areas like domain authority. For example, a factor that goes into domain authority is how long your URL has existed on the Internet or how many people are linking to your site. So those are things that I'm not going to get into. I'm mainly going to focus on copy related to SEO. So there's five areas that I consider very important. The URL is something that people think of as you buy your domain at GoDaddy and or wherever you purchase your domains from. And they think of that as the URL. But for every page on your site that's also a URL that is related to your site. We'll get into the different page displays. There's the page title of every page in your site. So this is something that you see in the top of your browser window when you're looking at a website. So this title tag is something that also usually appears in the first line of a SERP. We'll show a display of that in a minute. Meta description is something that SEO is an area where there's much to be debated. For every person that has an opinion on one thing, there's somebody else that says something different. So some people would say that the meta description is no longer a factor in Google ranking algorithms. I contend that because the meta description is the thing that appears in the SERP next to your page title, it's an indirect factor in your future SERPs because the meta description is the thing that somebody is going to see in the result page that would inspire them to click on that link. And the more people that click your links, the better. So meta description is something of an indirect factor. But because it's something that people see, I look at it as still very important for search engine optimization. It's really one of the main things that the search engine is going to display about your site. Headline tags. Headline tags are something that some people use to format if you're used to creating multi-page documents in Microsoft Word or some other text editor. Headline tags are a great way to quickly and easily style written copy. Now the way that headline tags work in a web page is slightly different than in a standard text document because the headline tags are something that the search engine is going to read. We're going to look at a couple different sites and how their headline tags appear. And it's interesting to think that what you're displaying visually you're assuming is a headline because it's bold and maybe in a larger font. That doesn't necessarily mean that's what the search engine sees as the headline. It needs to be properly formatted. And as I mentioned before, images and other rich content we'll touch on that a little bit. Search engines love images and video and things like that. They're an important factor in how your page is going to relate in terms of the user experience. Google wants everyone to have a relation to the web pages it provides in search as being rich in user experience. But we've got to help the search engine in order to have them understand what our images are about as related to search. So we'll talk about that in a couple slides as well. Moving on, these are the areas that we can see are related to the pieces I was just discussing. So the URL itself, here we can see on the text soup page that it's a bit of a lengthy URL. And also again I apologize for the small text here. But just so you understand what's in the address bar is the URL. And all that text there is important for search engine optimization in your search ranking. The page title as I mentioned is in the top part of the browser bar. When web browsers went from opening single windows to opening multiple tabs, a lot of times people began to overlook the page title because as we open more tabs across our browser and go to more places in the Internet the area for display of the title becomes smaller. So a lot of times we don't think to look at the title of a page. We just kind of take it for granted that what we're looking at is in the main body of the page. But that page title even if we can't see it is still important to search engine optimization. Here on the page we've got an example of some H1 and H2 tags. So they look like and act like in the code proper H1 and H2. And then I posed the question where's the meta description? The meta description is what's displayed in the SERP page. So as an example, if you happen to do a search for screaming blue monkeys this is what you're going to get back from a SERP using DuckDuckGo. So the meta description is the part that the arrows are pointing towards. You've got the URL first, and then below and next to that you've got the meta description that's in the page. So that's where you see the meta description. Now these areas of the site there are some specific characteristics that tend to work best for search engine optimization. So for example, in the URL you don't want that URL to exceed 115 characters. That seems to be about the most characters you can put into a URL and have it still perform well in Google results or other search engine results. And you want those words that are used in the URL to be relevant and aligned with the rest of the keywords and ideas on that page and especially in these other five touch points. So if you have an option say you're using WordPress or some other content management system that automatically creates your URL for you and you've got options in the admin section of your content management system to auto create pages based on the article title or whether it's based on the date or some other random set of numbers, you might consider configuring it to use the article title for the URL. So that way you'll pretty much automatically get that alignment of what the article or page is about into the URL. Instead of having it show a random list of characters. Same is true with the page title. There are specifics there. There's a max character length and a minimum character length. And by characters I mean every single character counts including the spaces and dashes. So I use an Internet site that counts characters for me. I just paste a page title into this character counter. I hit count and it gives me back exactly how many characters when I'm authoring a page so that I can work on optimizing the number of keywords to that specific 30 to 65 character sweet spot as far as the page title goes. You want a high keyword to text ratio in the page title and you can have it the same as the other elements in the page. You can have the same keyword mentioned several times in all of these different areas in the URL in the page title and H1 in the meta descriptions. But what you really want to avoid is having these keywords that are relevant to this page used over and over again in multiple pages. So you don't want to say put a meta description in that default that just has your company name and then every single page that you produce has the same meta description. The way the search engines evaluate the rankings has a lot to do with I think of it as how much effort is a person or a webmaster putting into a website? And if you're auto-populating your meta description or your page titles with the exact same phrase over and over and over again, the search engine is not going to have an easy time differentiating between the different pages. Everything becomes kind of gray and not specific and in a sense you're penalized for that. You're not going to have your site show up as well in rankings for any of these pages. You really want to have each page specific for specific concepts related to that page and you want that page to be unique compared to other pages. So I'm going to spare going through all of the different specifications for each of these different areas. I think you're all going to have an opportunity to download the presentation later on so you can see these specific as related to these different areas. Let me just touch real quickly on the images. So for images, thanks to high-def cameras and our ability to shoot a picture and immediately post it to a website, one thing that still counts is that images are optimized for rapid download and it seems to be that there's about 100 kilobyte maximum as far as the size of a web picture. So one thing you might want to do with the pictures that you're putting onto your website is to make sure that they're not the original raw large files of a picture. You want to make sure that you take that picture into some photo editor and reduce the dots per inch on that picture down to a web optimized size. And by web optimized, I mean people use either 72 DPI or maybe up to 150 DPI and make the size of the picture aligned with the size of the display required for the page. Don't just put an 8x10 picture into a 2x4 space on your page and have the page download the whole fat file to the client and then have a style guide reduce the size of the picture for display. You actually want to take some time to massage your pictures so that you're displaying and providing a picture that's going to make for a rapid and easy download. One other thing about pictures is you have an opportunity to put in all text and title information in the code around a picture. And this is very important too. This shows up when you mouse over a picture and it tells you what the picture is about in a little pop-up window. Search engines read this information as well. Search engines like I said before don't have eyes. They can't see the picture. They're not going to recognize that this is a picture of a person helping to build a dam for a water recovery project or something. It only knows that picture as the file name and the alt text that you put around it. So take the time to name your picture formats according to what's in the picture and also replicate that with what you're putting in the alternative text there in the code. So great time for a little live demo of some crawling of some websites that some people have volunteered. So we're going to get into a couple different library sites, a couple different nonprofit sites. I'm going to look at the source code and show you how to use a tool that's available for free for a limited-use product called Screaming Frog. Anybody can go and download this tool and it will work on your website for free up to 500 pages. So for many small to medium-sized businesses who don't have a website that's more than a few hundred pages, this is a fantastic way to evaluate your own website and look at your site in the same way that the search bots are looking at your site. So I'm going to go ahead and do a little screen sharing here and pull up some websites that we're going to look at visually and then we'll look at some code. While James is doing that, just let us know if it moves a little too slowly or doesn't load quickly for you and we will slow it down if we need to. Okay, so I'll be watching the chat to meter that if we need to. Okay, so the first site that I want to take a look at is the Nicaragua Covenant. And it's a very nicely presented page here. We've got Rich Text. We've got some professional-looking navigation up top. One little tip I did want to throw in aside from general code review real quick is that the search bot is going to read your page top-down and left-to-right, meaning that the things that are most important to you should be at the top of the page. And navigation in particular is something that heavily weights on the importance of an idea in your website and how well it's going to rank in search engines. So one thing that I notice quite frequently is that a lot of standard web templates start off with the first page being built is called the home page. That makes sense. This is what we consider the main starting point of the site. One thing that I would give everyone advice on unless you're in the real estate market and you're selling homes, you might want to rename your home page to something that's more related to what you're actually working on. So here the Nicaragua Covenant has home pages, their first navigation item. And they might be better off using something more related to their mission, maybe Mobile Health Clinic if they think that's what people are going to search for. That might be a better title for this navigation item than home. So if you haven't before looked at the code of a web page, one quick way to do it, I'm on a PC is to hit Control-U and you'll see what the search bot sees when it sees your web page. So this is one way to do SEO. I could come in here and do a search for title. And I would see here that here's the title for this page. And that's going to let me look at the title like the search engine looks at the title. And I could look at all the different elements in this manner. And it would be a very long drawn out process and I would browse to every page and I would look at every element and it would take me all day long. A more effective way is to get a tool like my buddy Screaming Frog here. And I've already cached this search but just to go over the process real quick, basically you put the address in this little address bar here. You hit the start button. And the Screaming Frog bot goes through the entire Nicaragua Covenant website. Liquity Split organizes all the information into this nice table where I can see the URL address of the home page here. And then I can see all the different content across the screen related to search engine optimization. So here I've got the title. I've got the length of the title. I've even got the title Pixel Width which is related to mobile these days. So since mobile screens are a smaller screen than a desktop screen, there's a specification for the Pixel Width of the title. Since this is going to show up, if somebody does a search on a mobile device and the Nicaragua Covenant shows up, in order for the search engine to show the whole page title, it needs to not exceed 400 pixels in width. And I know that because looking over here at the sidebar of Screaming Frog, 482 pixels, sorry, I correct myself. So the Pixel Width standard over here on the right lets me know that for page titles, 482 pixels is the max width. That's also conveniently about the same size as 65 characters. So again, I can look across this table here and I see all the information related to what the bot is going to see for looking at Nicaragua Covenant. So I've got the meta description, the length for that. I've got the H1 tag which you might notice there's nothing there. Same thing with the H2 tag and so on. So you can see how that's valuable for one page. And as the scanner scans the entire website, when we say it crawls, what happens is the bot looks at the page and then it follows the links on that page through navigation and through text links as if it were a person clicking on every link on every page all at the same time. And in doing so, it drills down through the entire website. With Screaming Frog also, I can quickly organize the content by type. I can look at the images or I can look at the HTML text. So here we've got the addresses for the different pages in their site. And really this is just a nice little 10-page site. They do a nice job with each page. It has some unique information here which is nice. It's in plain text which is good. I've got the contact page so if I searched Nicaragua Covenant Contact, it would probably bring me to the contact page instead of the home page which is a good thing. We talked about naming pictures appropriately. And as I get further down looking at the site and I look at the image files I can see that the image files are named uploads slash 2 slash 5 slash 8. You get the idea. There's not much text here that's going to relate to me what this picture is about. So in Screaming Frog I can look at this picture and I see that there is actually some text in the picture but the search engine can't read that text. It only sees this file name. So it might make sense that when they're uploading pictures to their page that they name the PNG, the picture file, something related to the picture itself. Like I would probably call this exactly what's text in the logo, New England Conference, United Methodist, Church, Dash, Logo, something like that. And the list goes on and on in terms of the pictures that are up on the website and the opportunities for embedding keywords that are related to their actual mission, feeding children for example. If I go to this page on their website I'm going to guess that there's pictures here and look at that. They've got pictures of OMAR distributing the seeds but I would guess that there's no picture named that here. So it would be great to have this text actually be the picture name that the search bot could read. So there's one example of how I go through a website and analyze it as far as the content and the relation to the search engine optimization. Let me grab another site real quick. Ocean Defenders. Got that one on file. And let's take a look at the Ocean Defender website. They're working on ideas for a debris-free sea. So fantastic. I spend a lot of time in the ocean. I'm glad that they're out there helping me enjoy that experience. And let's take a look at what Screaming Frog looks like as their website. So when Screaming Frog looks at their site what I see here is all the URLs over here. And when I scroll across I can see they've got really, really great text in their page titles. This is great. We've got an announcement about Bob Barker and we've got Plant Giving and Long Beach, Information and Event. Fantastic. One thing I noticed that they're doing is they've got an automatic population of this phrase here, news and media, into a lot of their different page titles. So this is something that if I look at their title lengths, we talked about the title length not wanting to exceed 65 characters. So what they've got with all this fantastic text that they're putting into their page titles, sometimes they're going a little bit beyond the call of duty. And we've got title lengths that are up at 158 characters. So this is an example of where a little bit less is more. They've put a lot of information into the title, but it's going to hold them back in terms of search engine optimization because this title length is really long. And it seems to be an issue that recurs on their site quite a bit. So a quick way to fix this or at least drop some of these character lengths down might be where their content management system is adding news and media to every page title or ODA's articles along with news and media to every page title. I'm just going to guess that from that vertical line before ODA's articles to the last A in news and media, it's probably about 20 characters. So they could fix a lot of their pages that are too long by just going into their administration of their content management system and having it not add this little bit of text to the end of every page title. It's not really going to add too much value to the keyword to length of character ratio since they've got it on every page. It doesn't really help out the uniqueness of the idea on the page. And if they had just the information like the whales maimed and killed by ghost gear, that might serve them better than having that also include the article in news media information on that title. So my analysis of these folks' website is not meant to be all-inclusive. I just want to point out some minor areas that might be easy to fix in a large scale with a simple reconfiguration of something in the back end of your content management system. So being that we're getting a little close to time, what I'd like to do is get back to the presentation, go through the rest of the slides that I'm going, and we can get to the QA portion of the site. So hopefully right now everybody has the presentation back on their screen. And I wish I had more time to go through more of the people's sites. They volunteered their site to get a quick scan, but hopefully that will give you a little bit of insight into how the search engine reads the site and how you can quickly analyze your own site to see if things are aligned and presenting as you think they are. So one thing I want to talk about is how to write search optimized copy. Now that we know where the search engine is going to look for the information and we know how to look at our page to check to see what information is there, let's talk a little bit about what we're going to put in those places. So a page title, you want to effectively communicate the topic of that page's content. Pretty clear. We've gone over a few different ways to do that. And the big idea here is that we don't want duplicate content in every page on our site. And we certainly don't want some random content messaging or content management system to put random code in there. We want real text in those URLs and the other places on the site we've talked about as well. We want to use straightforward, very clear third grade level communication style in these places. This is going to get us our biggest yield in volume for search. We want to cast a wide net with the content that we're putting in for copy. You want to put keywords related to the article first. So you want to put things that are unique and related up in the front of the sentence. Sometimes for variety you can pose a question that tends to resonate well with search engines. Also lists tend to work well for page titles. Top 5 tips on how to do search engine optimization, for example. You want to try and address the intent of the searcher. So put yourself in that person's shoes. If you've got a service or you're providing something, try to make what you're projecting as the solution to the problem. Try and answer the question that they're going to be asking. Again, as far as search engine optimization goes we all love a good joke. We all like a pun, but search engines aren't that smart. If you're not saying exactly what something is about, again in very straightforward third grade level English, then the point might be lost on the search engine. So save what's cute and funny for the copy, but probably want to spare your page titles and other places of these higher level ideas. There's lots of other factors that affect the SERPs. Content producers can only reach a limited number of touch points. So just try to really focus on those five areas that I talked about, and I'm sure you'll see a lot of improvement in those areas. Hopefully, there's people on this call that will be the hands-on web people and other people are going to be the business relationship managers or producing copy and content only and not working on the code. I hope that this talk has at least helped give you some of the terminology and understanding that's going to facilitate that conversation with your coding person. So that coding person might not be thinking about that they're putting your big ideas into the H1 and H2 formats. So at least now you'll be able to start that conversation with them and get them thinking about it. Inline link recommendations, you want to be obvious with these things. So you want to anchor text to match the landing point. For example, if I'm going to write an article about antivirus software and Bitdefender, the copy that I would want linked would be antivirus Bitdefender, not something else around that. You want to make your inline links very on target. Here's some more information where you can get into some more information about SEO. Google has provided a wealth of very clear guidelines. And their guidelines not rules, but they're very accurate. They've served me well over the years so I've provided quite a few links here for you. And that wraps up all the information. I hope it gets you started in improving SEO or at least getting that conversation going with your web person. I hope you've enjoyed what's been presented and I look forward to fielding what questions we can and the time remaining. Thank you so much James. Really appreciate that. And I like looking at those websites too. And I'm sorry we didn't have time to go over more of them. I know we had planned to do a library one as well. And in that vein we had a question about libraries in particular and how Kendra commented that she has access to some of her stuff that she can edit herself on WordPress but other places and other content is locked down and it's only available to a city webmaster who can change them. So her question is really where do you adjust meta tags and is that something that an admin, like maybe a top level admin can only do? Or is that something that she should be able to have access to? What do you think James? That's a great question. So for WordPress specifically there are a variety of plugins that would allow the copy person to put information that would allow the copy person to put information into the website especially for all of the different SEO areas. So it might be that by attending this presentation today you can have a more meaningful conversation with that admin at your city level and ask him if he could provide an SEO plugin that would allow you to put the keywords and search engine optimized content into the places on the web pages where it would have a lot of meaning. And it would also do that in a manner which would assure the admin that you wouldn't be getting involved into parts of the site that you could misconfigure anything. So there's tools there that should allow you some access that would make both sides of this team comfortable. We have another question? Yep, we have quite a few actually. And I think in that vein just keeping in mind that we tried to provide a mix of tips today that you could apply if you do have those top level admin controls and also changes you can make to the copy that you're putting out there that can help improve it even if you don't get access to that because we know lots of libraries, lots of affiliate organizations who may have a website that's handed to them by a top branch or an affiliate like a YMCA may give you a site to use for your local branch that you may not have full control over all of it. So we tried to give you a variety. Let's see, we also have some questions around do you need to purchase Screaming Frog? You showed that tool and I believe there's a free version and maybe a paid version. Do you know that offhand, James? Yeah, they have a free version of Screaming Frog that will work for up to 500 pages in a website. So for most small and medium-sized businesses I found it quite useful for the 500-page free version and there is a paid version which is going to be able to scan all the pages on any size website. So whichever one suits your needs or budget I guess would be the key takeaway there. Great. We have some other questions about images. So one person wants to confirm the size of images. You don't want them to be over what size? And she questions, is it 100 kilobytes that you said? Yeah, the 100k spec is like most specs in SEO a guideline. The real thing to consider here is that you're not uploading the original RAW from straight from the camera photo that could be with the way cameras shoot HD these days. Those could be very large files, you know, 10 megs or larger. So just think of it as before you post a picture just bring it into a photo editor, try and reduce the DPI from high res down to something in the ballpark of between 72 and 150 DPI and just reduce that file size that your download time is ultimately you want to have your file load on to the person's page in just as few seconds as possible. So a slow loading page with a big picture is not going to rank as well in search returns as the same page with smaller files and smaller pictures. So smaller is better. Great. And with that in mind you've mentioned a little bit around the titles of the pictures when you were looking at the Nicaragua Covenant site. And do you have any tips on alt text and if there's a formula or character limit or keywords that people should keep in mind when putting in alt text for images? Yeah, alt text that definitely gets a lot of discussion in SEO forums. So the practice of keyword stuffing comes up quite a bit with alt text in that if you put keywords into alt text that are probably a little too obvious that you're trying to gain the search engine and that you're not describing the picture anymore, you're just putting keywords into that parameter then that might work against you. So I think of it as describing the picture in the context of the article. And I don't really think so much about the character limits on those but generally speaking this is text that's going to display when somebody mouses over a picture. So if you put a huge block of text in there it's going to take away from the user experience. I would just try and keep it short and sweet, throw some keywords in there but don't forget to describe the picture in context as well. Great advice. And Diana, one of our participants gives a good reminder that content developers, web developers should be considering their community including blind or limited visibility members of their community who may be using screen readers. And they rely on that alt text with screen readers to really describe what the image is since they may not be able to see it themselves. And she actually asks, is there any online tool that you're aware of that can check for whether an image is easily read by a screen reader that's accessible? I can try and follow up with that one after if James doesn't have recommendations too. Yeah, so the area that Diana is getting into I believe is what you call section 508 compliance which is a government standard regarding access and usability. What I would do to test for that compliance would be to just download a screen to text reader and just have it go through the pages. It's definitely a great idea. If you design pages that are optimized for site-impaired people and you design a site that is very compatible with the text reader you're oftentimes developing a site that's very rich for people who don't have these site disabilities and they're also going to rate very well for search engine optimization. So if you want to Google section 508 compliance that's one direction you could go or there are a variety of browser to audio applications and that's going to provide that functionality to check for your compliance and usability there. Great, and Tony offers up one of the participants says Moz.com may have some tools that can also help with that. So that's one option to look at too. Yeah, Moz is a tool I use quite often. Moz is interesting for search engine optimization. It provides information not just about your site but also about sites that you compete with. So since everybody's website is out there on the Internet you can often learn from the people that you're competing with. In the nonprofit world I think of it more of a co-operation in that we can learn from each other and we can all raise our search engine results up as a group. So it's nice to use a tool like Moz which is going to provide you information about other sites in your market, what keywords they're focusing on and how they're ranking for those keywords. So yeah, there's definitely a lot of different tools out there for different slices at the SEO world. Moz is one, Google Webmaster Tools is another one that's pretty frequently used. So yeah, just basically learning how your site is presenting to the search engine and the user and making sure you're presenting what's in line with what you think people are going to search for. Great, and we are just about at time but one other quick question. You mentioned a character counter tool that you use. Is that something that people could easily find with a Google search? Any Google search for character count tool will pull up a variety. And I tend to look for the ones that have less advertising just because they load quicker. But yeah, they're really easy to find. They'll come up quickly for you. Great. I often just use word or outlooks, built-in word counter tools, character counter tools. Copy the text. Anyway, if you would like to ask additional questions, let me just point you quickly. We'll be continuing the discussion and have experts on hand in our design and web building forum that can answer additional SEO questions that we didn't have time to get to today. Go ahead and tell us one thing you learned today that you will try to implement or that you learned that will help you in your own web copy and creation and web developing process. And we'd also like to ask you to share this with your friends and colleagues who may find this information useful. Thank you everybody for all of your great questions. Thank you James for the presentation. I'd like to go ahead and invite you to join us for upcoming webinars. 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