Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engines can recommend your site to the right people (searchers) by understanding what your site is about. They read your website with a crawler, also known as a web spider, web robot. That means that it's up to us to communicate clearly with the search engines to tell them what can be found on your site, what kind of visitor you're looking for, and how important your site is in the grand scheme of things. This is SEO at it's most basic level.

The content management system we use, Drupal, is search engine friendly. We set it up with clean URLs. The page addresses integrate automatically the content title in the path. This is called an alias. So, after your site is up for some time, it will appear by itself in Google (think in terms of several month). But sometimes we want to speed things up and have the highest possible ranking for certain keywords.

When we do a SEO, we go through a checklist:

• Do the titles from the pages reflect the content? In Drupal  the page title is the content title, but we can change that.
• An alias provides a nice clean URL for a path on a site. However Drupal does not remove the old path (eg node/1234). The problem is that you now have two URLs representing the same content. This is dangerous territory for duplicate pages which can get you sandboxed by the search engines! So we enable a global redirect for all the old URLs.
• Create one or more search engine accounts and authenticate your site.
•  Add meta tags for page. Giving more attention to the important keywords. Add relevant titles also to all images.
• Create and submit a XML sitemap. This helps search engines keep their search results up to date.
• If appropriate, submit to Google Local.

A big deal depends on how many times your site is mentioned on other sites (referrers). This can be established by subscribing to forums and social networks that treat about the subject of your site. You should participate actively on the web and link to your own pages as much as possible. A forum about "scuba diving"? Simply subscribe and add a tread in the forums "How to make circular bubbles".  Open with the sentence "Want to see circular bubbles? Go to http://deardivebuddy.com/education/circular-bubbles-how-make-them-safely ."

You might not be interested in a worldwide public, but only in your local area. In this case printed promotion is a good additional option. Business cards, announcements in local media, pens, baseball caps. This generates direct access.

In the beginning direct and referring links take up the majority of the traffic. This will sooner or later been taken over by search engine traffic. It takes at least several month of patience before Google gives your site a minimum of importance.

The best thing you can do is deliver quality content. If visitors from different origine stay on your site quit a while, Google "thinks": "Oh look! People find that content interesting. Let's give it a higher ranking".
The next best thing is to deliver new updated content (e.g. the newsletters) regularly. If the content remains unaltered for a long time, Google "thinks" it's a dead site.