• This workshop will go through the basics of how to make your website findable. Suitable for anyone who has a website and wants it to do better in search engine results. No technical background is required. I'll be talking about constructive techniques that enhance the content of your site and improve the quality of information on the internet. (In geek-speak: no black hat stuff)

• Facilitator: Chris Lawson

• Chris Lawson is Communications Officer, New Media at the Public Service Alliance of Candada. Loosely translated, this means he's responsible for design and editorial direction of the union's national website, psac-afpc.org.

Go-around

• Who are you, what's your website, what's your relation to it and what do you hope to get from this workshop

Workshop plan

• I promise to take the prescribed breaks and not to punish the punctual.
• This is a talk about the basics of findability and show what I've managed to learn from my own SEO campaign on cupe.ca and seeing how a mostly non-optimized site fares in comparison.
• With any luck we'll have time to check out the websites of some participants and see how they're doing.
• Please stop me if you have any questions. This is going to be a bit jargony and there will be acronyms. Chances are others are in the same boat.
• We’re going to be dealing with Google even though there are a few other search engines out there.
• We're not going to learn how to do so-called 'black hat' techniques

What is findability?

• The term came into more common use in 2005 when Peter Morville published Ambient Findability: what we find changes who we become.
• Moreville defines the term as:
• The quality of being located or navigated, the degree to which an object or a piece of data can be located, and the degree to which a system supports navigation and retrieval.
• People can find the site via search engines or directory listings, they can find what they're looking for once they arrive and they come back to find more.

What is search engine optimization?

• Search engine optimization is the process of gearing your site's domain name, design, markup, content and linkscape so that your pages show up closer to the top of searches on popular search engines.

• For the same reasons we create and maintain websites in the first place.
• We're not moving product but we are trying to win converts. Maybe we want people to visit our site ahead of the employers for information about our strike.
• If you can't be found easily, there's not much point in doing a website.
• Search engine-referred traffic is becoming increasingly important as a percentage of cupe.ca's total traffic. (to 61% in 2008 from 53% in 2006)
• PSAC’s non-optimized site gets 14% fewer visits than CUPE, but only about a third of its traffic from search engine referrals. Much room for improvement.
• Search engine referred visits 50 per cent more likely to be new visitors than direct traffic or referred traffic.
• A brief recap on what a good website can do for us:
  • Fewer FAQs via phone, fax and email
  • More visitors: our message getting ‘out there’ and all the benefits that come from that
  • More effective online actions
  • Less paperwork as people order stuff and sign up for conferences online.

• This is serious work. It's going to take a long time. The outcome is not at all obvious. And much of it is out of your control.
• It's also a bit of an experiment. More than a bit, actually.
• Have objectives and ways of measuring how well it's going
• Record your progress: not only what your results are, but what you did and when
• Measure success (see the chart)

• Start tracking your website visitors.
• Unless you have money to burn, the answer is Google Analytics.
• Google for webmasters can show you how your site fares with search engines
• Definition: Keyword isn't necessarily a keyword. It’s more likely (and more effective) if it's actually a phrase or a few words. Mostly nouns. Mostly nouns that explain the who what where and why of your website.
• There may be serious religion around the words you use to describe yourselves. Child care workers aren't baby sitters, for example, though baby sitter is a more frequently searched term.
• Keyword choice is tangled up with who your audience is and what are your larger goals for your website.
• A local union whose members make car parts might want to rank highly in searches for their employer's brand name as part of a public campaign, but if the local is just trying to service its members online, identifying too closely with the employer's brand might not build trust with members.
• Use del.ico.us to see what keywords people are already using to describe you.
• Use your website stats to see what people are using.
• Keyword research can tell you surprising things.
• You'd think the plain language term "child care worker" would be a more frequent search term than "early childhood educator". But you'd be wrong.
• You're going to use these keywords in variety of places: headlines, sub-heads, body copy and others, so they need to sit well with you and they need to... ah... make sense.

How efficient are your keywords?

• Keyword efficiency is a measure of how popular a search term is, compared to how many sites are out there answering for that term.
• This ratio is commonly known as the Keyword Effectiveness Index.
• wordtracker.com can show you how efficient your keywords are
• A good Keyword Efficiency Index is somewhere between 10 and 100. The lower the number, the harder time you'll have getting ranked on that keyword.

More keyword research tools

• Google Adwords Sandbox
• SEO book keyword suggestion tool
• Google Keyword suggestion tool

• Check to see if you are you being indexed now? (Google Webmaster tools)
• Search for site:www.yoursite.com on Google, Live and Yahoo.
• Take your new found keywords and Google them.
• how are you ranking now?

• Back to Google Analytics: absolute unique visitors referred by search engines?
• Your rank relative to a competitor/rival union/employer
• Conversions of some kind.

Another upside to supporting a standard

• XHTML-compliant. XHTML is a web standard -- a universally-agreed to set of rules about how web text is to be conditionned (marked up) so that it appears as the publisher expects.
• X stands (misspelled) for Extended. It looks a lot like regular HTML, but it makes a lot of bulky old tags obsolete (deprecated) and it puts every part of your page into its own neat, self-contained package. This makes it easier for search engines to interpret.
• HTML 5 will also do. But the world isn't ready for it just yet
• Semantic. Search bots can't tell which parts of your page matter and which bits don't unless you tell them. Semantic markup uses the tags to assign roles and relative importance to the bits of text on your page, from the mighty main headline <h1> to the lowly paragraph <p>.
• We didn't use to do this. Our markup was all about the presentation. We used to write a bunch of crap just to make a headline look big and blue.
• CSS. Stands for Cascading Style Sheet. A cascading style sheet is a document that describes how all that semantic markup is supposed to appear to the viewer. If done right, one such document can apply to an entire website. The browser only has to download it once.

Another other upside to coding to web standards

• Web pages marked up with semantic XHTML and styled using an external style sheet are 40 per cent smaller than similarly arranged 'old school' HTML.
• It will save you all sorts of hassles next time you try to redesign your website.
• Users with visual or mobility challenges will have an easier time navigating your site.
• Your pages can rank higher because you can place your keywords strategically.
• Google cares about semantics. A keyword in an <h1> is worth more than a keyword in a <p> and it doesn't know or care what <font> tags mean.

Page size is an issue

• The internet is indexed by computer programs called 'bots that download, compress, analyze and categorize the content on the internet's 11 billion web pages.
• Those are some busy programs. They don't have a lot of time for you.
• Total page size should not exceed 150 kilobytes (150K). Some say less -- 100K.

The invisible

• The <title> tag
• <meta> tags.

• Google actually uses the contents of the meta description tag. Use it.
• Facebook uses the meta description to fill in the blanks when someone shares your content on their facebook page. Many people don't know they can edit that content. So it's important you get it right.

• Meta Keywords is ignored by all major search engines. Don't waste your keystrokes.
• Earliest search engine hack
• Meta robots is more efficiently dealt with in your robots.txt file. Using a meta tag to tell robots to index the content on a per page basis is a waste of perfectly good zeroes and ones. They're gonna do it unless you tell them not to.

• This is the markup to produce a link on a page where clicking on the words "Background on privatization" takes you to CUPE's privatization landing page. Those words, and the words immediately around it, are the link text.
• Google does a textual analysis of the words in the link text. They're looking for: positive associations, comparing the words used in the link text with content on the linked page to determine relevance.

• This markup references a JPEG image and places it on the page. It's been optimized for search engines, namely:
  • the file name
  • the alt and title attributes
• If you have images in your page that are part of the presentation (aka decoration) take them out of the XHTML and make them CSS background images instead

• Domain names should include your keywords.
• Organizational domain names rank well for the name of the organization, but you may have other plans.
• If you have multiple words in your domain name, join them with hyphens. join-our-union.ca.
• You can't have spaces but hyphens are legal and they're the only punctuation you can use if you want the search engines to understand the words as words.
• Underscores don't work.
• Register the domain without any punctuation and put that on your business cards.
• If you change your domain name don't let your old one lapse. Domain names age like wine, but only if they don't expire.