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Promoting your Website

Converge has submitted our home page and the website index page to various engines. However, we do not have time to offer the same service for all NGO websites.

Nevertheless, we do encourage NGOs to publicise their websites. One of the best ways to do this is be submitting the site's main pages to search engines.

Another good way to publicise your website is to include the website address and your email address on all stationary and publications. That way people who come into contact with your organisation's literature will know that you have an email address and a website.

This page explains the website promotion process and what to look for. You will find useful hints and links to the URL submission pages of popular search engines.

• The first thing you should do is identify the pages that you want to submit.

  Usually you will submit the main page, any index pages, and any pages that have particularly unique and interesting content.

• Next you should decide what keywords and concepts best describe each page.

  Choose the most relevant terms and those that you think people are most likely to search for.

  There is a search hierarchy.
  When a search engine ranks a page for relevance in a search, it gives most weight to words appearing in the page title. Next important are metatags and then words that appear on and at the beginning of the webpage.

  Not all search engines rank searches exactly the same way. However, if you use the techniques described below your pages should rate well on a wide range of search engines.

• Title

  First, if possible, you should put a few of the most important keywords in the title of the page.

  The title appears in the TitleBar of your web browser - top left of screen. The title of this page is "APC Converge - Promoting Your Website". You should see this title at the top left of your screen.

  Remember that Search results are usually ranked alphabetically. If possible, put the words starting with a, b or c first. This should ensure that your page is sorted higher.

• Metatags

  Metatags have next highest priority. A metatag is a tag that is written into the HTML code of webpages to show tell search engines about the page. You can not see a metatag unless you look at the HTML document source code.

  Try looking at the document source code for this page and you will see three metatags, "description", "keywords" and "distribution". You may notice that words are repeated within the metatags. This is because some engines rank searches according to the number of times a searched for term occurs in each web page.

  You can copy the metatags from this page and include them in your own page, but remember to edit them before you save the page to the webserver.

• Contents of the Page

  Finally, some search engines actually look at what is on your page. It is possible to hide blocks of in the page. Use a homogenous background, set the hidden text as small as possible and to the same colour as the background.

  If you drag your mouse over the top of this page you will see that there is hidden text. If you look at the source code of the page then you will be able to see whatthe hidden text says.

  Hiding multiple keywords at the top of the page is another way to boost the chances of your page coming up near the top of a search.

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When you have chosen your keywords, (and rewitten some of your pages to make them better search targets) you are ready to submit your URLs to search engines.

Some engines will ask you to submit various details about your page, others will simple ask for the url and will check out the page itself.

The quickest way to find submit to 20 engines is by using the free Submit-it service. However, this will not customise submissions for each search engine. You choose how you wish to promote your site.

Below we have links to search engine URL submission pages.

If you find any particularly relevant and interesting search engines then please let us know about it so we can include the address on this list.

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