Promoting your site

Without effective promotion, your website is unlikely to be seen as often as you would like. As you have invested time and money in the site, promoting it certainly makes sense. The site will not achieve the aims hoped for if your target audiences do not know it is there and are not regularly reminded of it.

Developing a promotional strategy

Even before your website goes live to the public you should think about:

• promotional techniques, when they should be carried out, who will do the work, resources (people, money and equipment) required, and the expected benefits
• risk management strategies – what could go wrong and how you will deal with it
• how the strategy will be explained and sold to everyone in the organisation, its sponsors and supporters
• the strategic fit with your organisation's marketing plan
• how to assess the success of the strategy and how to make any necessary changes.

Making sure users can find your site with search engines

Many people will try and find your website at some stage by using a free search engine facility such as Google or Yahoo. Search engines list sites in order of what they see as ‘relevance’ to a search query.

Submitting your website details to search engines will speed up the process of getting noticed, and getting people to your site. To make sure people can find you easily you will want to appear as high as possible in relevant search engine result lists. Doing this is called ‘search engine optimisation’.

Note, however, that different search engines take different amounts of time to process your information and list your website. The delay can vary from one week to two months before you see a result.

Do it yourself

Registering your website with key search engines is relatively easy. It’s usually free, and it’s one of the first things you should do once a website has been launched or redeveloped:

Compose a descriptive sentence (usually up to 25 words) that summarises your site's content. This sentence should be simple, in plain English, and state the main contents of the site. For example, if you were the manager of a kid’s cricket club that organised a competition and ran special cricket training days you might compose a sentence like this: ‘Sydney Northern Suburbs Cricket Club organises junior cricket competitions for 6 to 15 year olds, and runs special cricket training days in the school holidays.’ (24 words).
Then pick out the keywords and consider if you need some extras: ‘junior cricket, northern suburbs, cricket competition, cricket training’, and a few local suburb names with the word ‘cricket’ after them.

Identify the most popular search engines that allow you to register your site with them. At the minimum you should consider: google.com, yahoo.com, msn.com, and sensis.com.au.

Log on to these sites, locate the online registration area or form and complete the instructions. You will probably be asked to use the sentence you composed in step 1 above.

Many search engine directories, like Yahoo, are organised into categories, and allow you to register your site in multiple categories. It takes time to register your website with the most popular search engines and may be a day's work, but usually it is free.

The search engine owners will check your application and choice of categories and index the site. This usually takes two to six weeks.

Free search engine listing services

There are dozens of companies that specialise in helping organisations with search engine listings. Some also offer a free, automated, service that lists your domain name with multiple search engines. See for example:

http://www.submitexpress.com/

Even if you use an automated listing service, you should manually register your own details with the major search engines like Google so that you can see if there are any problems reported.

Three tips for getting listed on search engines

1. Use keywords carefully

Keywords are submitted to search engines along with your domain name, or are included in the metadata for your website. (Metadata is the hidden text in a web page that explains to search engines what the page is about. Ask your website developer about how to add metadata.)

Keywords need to relate to your website. Avoid being too general or your listing will get lost in among thousands of other sites. For example, don’t use ‘football’ but rather something like ‘kids football club’; don’t use ‘child care’, use ‘ Richmond childcare’.

Try to think like your target audience. What would they search for when looking for your website? They will not necessarily use the same keywords as you. If your site has content of interest to a specific geographic location be sure to include the actual location in your keywords.

You should try to come up with as many keyword phrases as you can think of that relate to your site. Try asking a few friends and family what they would search for when searching for a site like yours.

If you know of a common misspelling of a popular keyword that could be used to find your site you should include it. For example, an inner Sydney site might use ‘woolloomooloo’ as a keyword as well a common misspelling such as ‘wooloomooloo’.

Have a look at other sites for ideas. Do a search using keywords that you already know you want to target and click through on the top sites that come up. Once on the site look at the source HTML code and the keywords in their metadata – this should give you many more ideas. To view the HTML code simply click the ‘View’ at the top of your web browser then select ‘Source’, or ‘Page Source’.

2. Test your site for search engine robot readability

Search engines collect information about sites by scanning them with automated ‘robots’. These robots are basically text readers. Viewing your site with a text-only browser (e.g. Lynx browser) will give you a quick understanding of what works and doesn’t work for a search engine. Ask your web developer for help with this. Changes you make will also help your site meet web accessibility guidelines.

3. Beware of trying to trick search engines into giving you a higher listing

There are a range of techniques used by unscrupulous website owners to get higher rankings. These usually involve engineering false information about site contents or popularity. Search engines keep a close eye out for these practices; someone found out risks being blacklisted by them.

Advertising on a search engine

Advertising on the internet can be an uncertain and expensive business. Banner ads are the most visible form of advertising, but many readers ignore them unless they directly meet an immediate requirement.

However advertising your service or an event can be done cheaply based on how many times people see your advert. Also known as ‘targeted keyword advertising’ or ‘adwords’, this type of promotion has been used effectively by many nonprofits.

Search engine advertising involves creating small advertisements that will appear on a search results page whenever someone searches for a particular term or keyword. If you search, for example, on Yahoo for ‘fishing’ you will see down the right hand side of the results page a number of display ads for various fishing services.

The idea is to identify some key search terms to advertise under. Search engines will charge you a modest fee based on ‘exposures’ (the number of times your ad appears). Your ad will get exposure when users search for your nominated keywords.

Getting listed in directories and portals

A range of public sector and commercial websites provide directories of community organisations. Some of these sites provide nonprofits with access to a password-protected online form that allows them to directly update and amend their information online.

Being listed on directories in your sector or region is an important way of letting people know about you and getting them to go to your website.

It is similar but different to maintaining your site as a page on a community directory. The difference is that you maintain your own separate site but are using the directory site to promote your own.

These directories include:

• online White pages and Yellow pages – for a small fee you can get a link from your phone entry to your website.
• your local council’s website – many maintain a free directory of community organisations on their websites.
• a range of commercial sites, e.g. communityguide.com.au provides free listings for community groups and sporting clubs.
• specialist online directories – often you will need to pay to be listed. An example is Pro Bono Australia which provides a directory of nonprofits as part of a ‘guide to giving’ aimed at lawyers who are advising clients about wills and trusts.

Here is some information about national directories of community organisations:

• The Australian Government’s Community Portal which provides access to online services and information for Australian community organisations and communities. The portal has links to over 3,000 sites with information and services provided by the government and the non-government sector.
• This Australian Government portal provides a listing of community organisations in the culture and recreation field.
• Our Community directory of community and nonprofit groups.
• InfoXchange community services directory – slightly Victoria-centric.
• State and territory directories of community organisations:
• ServiceLink is an online directory of human services in NSW. It provides organisational information (address, website, email, telephone, fax details) and displays specific details for each service. It's available to government and non-government human services staff across NSW; it's free but you have to register first.
• Greater Western Sydney Community Services directory and the NSW-government sponsored communitybuilders.nsw.
• A directory of community organisations in Sydney by local government area.
• South Australian government directory of community organisations and South Australian InfoSearch directory.
• Tasmania.
• AVictorian directory is http://www.civ.org.au/ and here is another.
• ACT

Here are some other directories or portals that provide links to nonprofit organisations:

• National or regional sporting organisation sites which usually list all local soccer clubs in their region. As an example see Northern NSW Soccer Federation.
• Some regional business development organisations. For example see riverland.net.au, a free directory set up by a local newspaper which will list community groups in the Riverina for free.
• Make a noise – a good youth voice portal with lots of links.
• Australian Indigenous websites
• African communities in Australia
• Index of peak women’s organisations

Advertising your site using traditional media

Advertising your organisation's web address in traditional media can be a very effective method of promoting the site. It also has the potential benefit of pointing those members of your audience who may not yet be regular users of the web, to the existence of your website.

A website can be promoted as part of any special or ongoing campaigns your organisation is involved in or simply on its own, through:

• magazines
• newsletters
• posters
• free postcards in cafes etc
• billboards
• newspapers
• television
• radio programs
• books.

Other promotional methods you might consider include:

• issuing press releases about virtual events, additional features on the website or reaching milestones
• entering internet awards
• inviting reviewers to review the site and write it up in magazines and newspapers.

Work out what you really want from promotion. For example is it increased traffic through the site (not just to the home page), increased downloading of documents and/or greater online use of services? As with any form of advertising, the expense needs to be justified. Simply increasing traffic to your website may not, in itself, reap sufficient benefits to justify the cost.

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Document ID: 1985, Last Updated: 23 January 2008 9:12am