 optimizing your website for search engines. This module is made available to you through a joint initiative between the Legal Services National Technology Assistance Project, the Legal Services Corporation, and IdealWare under a Creative Commons by-license. The information and structure of your website affects a lot of things. If you're meeting your constituents' goals, if your site is actually usable, or if your site is accessible to all visitors. But it also affects another important consideration. It affects how easily people can find your site through search engines. In this module, we'll look at how to optimize your website content, so it appears more prominently in search results. What does that mean? What is search engine optimization? When someone looks for your organization in a search engine, like Google or Bing, you'll want your organization to appear as a top result. That's the main idea behind search engine optimization, that if someone types in the name of your organization, or a phrase that relates to what you do, your website will pop up higher in the search results. The words or phrases that people type into search engines are called keywords. How do the search engines use these keywords? This graphic illustrates what's going on behind the scenes. Each stack in the diagram represents a website with its own pages and sections. Links connect the sites. This is how a search engine sees the web. Search engines use an automatic tool to click on every link it can find. This tool is often called a web crawler or a spider. The spider crawls all the links that it can find and navigates from one page to another. As it crawls, it stores information about each page it finds in an enormous online index. This process is invisible to you. You can't actually look and find a written index, but that is conceptually what's going on. The spider collects a URL and notes the keywords on the page, as well as how prominent they are. It also notes other sites that have linked to yours. Continuing our example, if I type a particular keyword, like eviction, into a search bar, the search engine consults its index for references to that keyword. It will find the pages that have prominent mentions of the word eviction and that also have a lot of other sites linking to them. These pages will show up first in the search results. The exact algorithm each search engine uses isn't publicly known, but they all follow this general concept of tracking the frequency of keywords, their prominence on the page, and the number of other sites that have linked to that page. So, there's a lot of factors to consider here. Links, keywords, where you put those keywords, and more. We're going to walk through them step by step. First, we'll talk about creating a great site that's worth finding. Then, how to get other people to link to your site. We'll then dive into keywords, how to choose them, and what to do with them on your site. Then, we'll talk about a few technical things to keep in mind to ensure your site is SEO friendly. Finally, we'll quickly touch on Google Grants. Step one is creating a site worth finding. The more complete and well-organized your content is around the most important ideas for your site, the better your search engine rank will be. Search engine optimization starts with great content. You want to make sure that your website has a lot of great content that people will want to read. Great content will naturally include a lot of effective keywords and will inspire people to link to you. That, in turn, will get you more publicity, and more publicity will also encourage more people to link to you. Having more supporters will help you deliver on your mission and will help you create more great content that will support the main purpose of the site for you to get more clients or supporters or volunteers. It's a positive feedback loop that starts with great content. Without good content, search engine optimization can go very wrong. If you somehow manage to achieve a high search engine ranking through tricks instead of actually creating a good site, people are going to be annoyed and irritated when they get there. So you'll gain nothing. Creating strong content is the main thing you need to do to achieve search engine optimization. You also want to think about how often you update your website content. Regularly posting new information will get that content included in search engines faster. If the web spider notes that new content is posted daily, then it will generally return to index that content every day. If you only update on a monthly basis, however, it won't return frequently, and there may be a delay of several weeks before your updated content is even noticed. A blog or a feed of current events with a lot of good keywords that are relevant to your mission can be really helpful for this. The next step is getting people to link to your website. Links from other sites are one of the key ways a search engine understands your importance versus all the countless other pages on the internet. If your site is sitting alone in the world, then it is unlikely that search engines will even find you at all. If you can't find your site by searching on obvious terms or in key search results, the first thing to do is make sure that you're included in the index. You can do a quick test for this. Search Google with the term site colon followed by your URL. Make sure that there's no space between the colon and the www. It won't work if there is. This will pull up all of your pages that the search engine has found and indexed. It's not unusual for a large site to have some pages that are not indexed, but you should make sure that all of the important pages on your site appear by performing this quick test. If you're not in the index, you need to get more people to link to your website. At a high level, links from places like great nonprofits or Google Maps or most any site that provides useful content to someone can help you get indexed and help your ranking. You're probably already listed on great nonprofits because they pull in guide star listings, but they will not have a link to your website unless you provide one. For Google Maps, you can simply submit your organization and your physical address, and it will create a link that it will include in its own index, and that counts as a link to your website. But to push yourself higher in the results, you want to turn to organizations that are related to you and your subject matter. One of the best ways to get links is to simply ask your partners and allies to link to your site. Membership organizations, like state associations of nonprofits, link to their members' websites. For legal aid organizations, stateside legal lists agencies by state for veterans and their families. Links from sites like these can improve your search engine ranking. Ask yourself, what do we have on our website that our partners would be interested in? Do we have a free training or a resource that is relevant to them? Can we create something great that will inspire people to link to it? For instance, this Pew Internet site has so much great research that it's widely linked to all over the place. You'll probably need to reach out to relevant organizations to let them know that your resource is there. Maybe local community organizations or national organizations that are interested in your topic. Oh, and by the way, if you were to search link colon and then your website, you'll be able to see the incoming links that you already have. There are services that claim that they'll submit your website to dozens or even hundreds of search engines. But there's no real reason to do this. First, there are not likely to be hundreds of search engines that you would actually want to be in. And second, there is nothing that these submission services will do that's actually worth paying for. That's not to say that there aren't really good SEO consultants because there are. But any good consultant should focus on helping you through the steps we've talked about. Great content, links, and keywords. There are no quick fixes. And anyone who is promising them is taking you for a ride. Onto our third step. What are the keywords that people use when they search for your organization? What keywords do you want to focus on? What are the high priority keywords for your organization's website? First, there's your name and any variance on your name. Here, the organization name is Arkansas Legal Services Partnership. You would certainly want to include both the official name and anything people often call you in shorthand or in error. For this instance, a variation like Arkansas Legal Aid. Then think of phrases that people might use to search for you like Arkansas Law Help or Arkansas Law Assistance. Should also consider the names of programs like Arkansas Helpline or the names of key staff members. How many keywords should you focus on? You could potentially come up with thousands of keywords for your site, but you should start with just a handful for your homepage or a few other key pages. Eventually, you might want to think about different keywords for different pages. Sites like Good Keywords or Word Tracker will show you predictive traffic on a certain keyword. For example, if I type in chocolate, it will brainstorm alternatives and predict the effectiveness of each suggestion. In Google, you could actually use their ad buying tool to research the effectiveness of a keyword without even buying an ad, and that will give you access to statistics as well. Don't get overwhelmed with keywords. Just stick with a finite amount that are most important for your organization. As you think through keywords, you need to balance the desire to use popular ones that get high traffic with more specific but less common terms that better describe your services. For example, many people might search for the term housing, but it would be difficult to show up high in the search rankings for that, as you'll be competing with real estate firms, college housing, and other sites. It will be much more practical to instead optimize for more specific keywords like New York City Eviction or Eviction Free Legal Help that are more tailored to the areas for which you specifically want to be found. Lastly, focus the most on the keywords that will bring people to your most important pages. Logically, you have to think through what those are. Your homepage is likely a priority page, perhaps your high-level category pages for each legal topic as well, or maybe your page with information for pro bono attorneys. All right, that moves us to step four. Where should you place your keywords once you've developed your list? There's no direct way, but there are several indirect ways. You should incorporate the keywords into the text on your pages. The more times and the more prominently, the better. So a brightly colored large piece of text, like a header, will count more to the search engines than a miscellaneous mention towards the bottom of the page. Shear quantity does help, though. If you look at this page, it lists hunger, hungry, child, children, feed, families, food, lots and lots and lots of times. Note that the words in an image, though, don't count because the web spider cannot crawl images. Of course, you need to balance the desire to repeat keywords over and over with your goals to actually communicate something to people. A page full of keywords and nothing else won't get links, won't communicate anything, and will annoy your constituents. If you have the ability to control the technical filenames used by your web pages, use human-readable URLs and try to include at least one keyword. For example, feedingamerica.org slash Faces of Hunger slash Real Stories slash Louisiana is much more effective than feedingamerica.org slash 853B6578. Including your keywords and your URLs can be a very powerful way to optimize your website for search engines. Another thing to check on is whether or not your content management system allows you to include keywords in your metadata title or metadata description. Metadata is information that's coded into the page, like this piece of code we're looking at here. The metadata title shows up in the header bar in your user's browser and in search results, while the metadata description will only show up in search results. Both are great places to include your keywords. It's worth trying to figure out how you can update these fields. Many content management systems, for instance, will give you fields to edit the page title and page description, and those almost certainly update your metadata. Last but not least, think about including your keywords in the text you use to link to your own internal pages. This will strengthen your search engine optimization and, hopefully, make your links crystal clear as well. Also, make sure to refer to your own programs or resources consistently. For example, Illinois Legal Aid Online launched a mobile app, Illinois Legal Aid Mobile App. To optimize that name as a keyword for search engines, they need to use that full name every time they refer to it, and they should encourage their partners to do so as well. They can do this by providing them with the proper link text. What can you do to ensure that your site is successful when the WebSpider visits? The WebSpider can't pull keywords from drop-down menus or navigation menus powered by JavaScript. If your site relies on these types of menus, you can get around this problem by listing all of your pages in a sitemap and linking to that on your homepage. Search engines give higher priority to keywords within the page title, H1, and the main header, H2. So make sure that the headers on your pages use the standard tags. A good programmer or content management system should do this automatically. Now, you might think that you have a creative idea to improve your search rankings. But repeat after me. I am not smarter than Google. It's almost certainly a bad idea to try to trick the system. The people who program the search engines have spent a lot more time thinking about these things than you have. Things like adding keywords in white text on a white background or setting up a secondary website that just links to your main site at the very least are really unlikely to work. But the worst-case scenario is that they could get your site thrown out of search engines. In addition to all the things we've been talking about, consider Google grants and paid promotions to put your site in front of more eyes. So far, we've focused on ways that you can optimize your site in order to be listed for free on any search engine. There's another way though to be listed prominently in Google's search results. Google gives away free search engine advertising through its Google Grants program, which provides $10,000 in in-kind ads per organization per month. These ads appear at the top of the search results for specific keywords. If you're approved for the program, you can place text ads that show up each time someone enters key phrases into the Google search box. The grants often offer enough free advertising to allow you to place ads for hundreds of keywords. The application process for Google Grants is really easy and streamlined. It's worth doing for any organization. Keep in mind though that it will likely take a few weeks, if not months, for Google to get back to you as to whether you're approved. Most people are approved, though Google does sometimes turn down organizations that they feel are too religiously or politically aligned. Google Grants isn't a replacement for the steps we talked about here. It only affects Google and not other search engines, and many organizations find that an ad to a page doesn't bring nearly as much traffic as a link to that page from the traditional search results. However, it's a straightforward process that can bring your organization more visibility when used in conjunction with traditional SEO techniques. So, to wrap up, search engine optimization isn't a particularly short or easy road, but it's important to take on at least some of the basic steps. For instance, ensuring your site is linked to from a few well-known websites, and including some of your most important keywords in page titles and headers. Search engines don't respond to changes overnight. In fact, it may take a month or more to see the results of your efforts reflected in the results. Don't give up hope. Keep including keywords in new content and asking other organizations to link to your resources. Once you do see some results, don't rest on your laurels. The Internet is a dynamic place, and new websites, new articles, and changing search engine priorities can affect your placement. Check in on the search results for your keywords at least every month or so to help maintain your position and continue to enhance your strategy. When your new donors, volunteers, or clients mention that they found you through a Google search, you'll be glad you took the time. These resources can help provide more background and best practices for your own website.