Increasing Your Web Site's Visitation

Maintaining and boosting your Web site's popularity is an ongoing effort. Many Internet marketing firms will promise miles and deliver inches. This article explains how your organization can increase its Web site visitation without breaking the bank.

1. Encourage other organizations to link to your Web site. Most search engines determine your Web site's importance based on how many other sites link to it. Consideration is also given to the importance of the sites that link to you. Therefore, one link from www.microsoft.com to your site is much better than 1000 links from the personal home pages of your family and friends. Getting other sites to link to yours can be difficult at times, especially if they are sites of large organizations. First, offer to trade links (e.g. you will link to them if they link to you). If that doesn't work, you might check if they have a message board. If so, wait for the appropriate subject and post a message with your organization's Internet address as part of your signature.
2. Use an Internet friendly writing style. Writing for the Web now has a style guide of its own. Readers of Web-based content scan more than they read for retention. As our eyes will tell us, reading a lot of long wordy paragraphs is not desirable on a computer monitor. Therefore, say what you need to quickly. For full coverage of this subject, see the definitive guide on Writing for the Web.
3. Know your Web site's strengths and weaknesses. Before you can increase your Web site's visitation, you must have a grasp on its current strengths and weaknesses. This is typically accomplished by way of a Web site statistics package. ENTECH uses a free software program called Awstats to analyze visitation and usage patterns. This gives us information such as:
   • Our most and least popular pages
   • By what search terms we are found
   • The average time spent by a visitor
   • The total number of visits to our site
   Using this and other information we enhance and adjust our site according to what the statistics tell us. For example, our page on Technology Policies is the most common way people find our site. Since Awstats told us that, we made sure there were other links on that page to encourage new visitors to explore other areas of our site. If you have never seen your Web site's statistics, contact your hosting company and ask for them!
4. Submit your site for inclusion in major Internet directories. It will take some time to get listed but be sure to add your site to:
   • Google
   • Yahoo
   • DMOZ
   Dmoz is especially important because its content is mirrored in many places around the Internet. Yahoo is one of the most popular search engines on the Internet and therefore an important one. Submitting your site to Google might not get it listed, but it helps to try!
5. Use technical measures to increase your site's interpretability by search engine spiders. There are many articles on the Internet about using technical tricks to increase your site's ranking. See ENTECH's Catering to Search Engine's article for the lion's share of technical information on increasing your site's interpretability by search engine spiders.
6. Use email to get your message out. You may very well be reading this article because you subscribe to the Nonprofit Portal's newsletter. ENTECH does not produce its own newsletter, but each time the Portal sends out an email to its subscribers we often piggyback on that message to highlight a new article or feature of our site. Email messages such as the Portal's newsletter get forwarded all over the world and end up on Internet-accessible message boards and other places you would never guess.
7. Update your site frequently, even in small ways. ENTECH's home page is updated usually twice a week. For this, we use a blog . "Blog" is Internet-slang for Web log. Web logs are usually informal daily shorts on what's pertinent to a particular organization, what might be making news that day or the latest change to the Web site. You can create a blog for free on www.blogger.com . Should a search engine encounter our home page, it will compare what it finds to what it saw last. If there is new content, we will rank a little bit better in their databases.

Hopefully these tips have given you a few places to start boosting your Web site visitation. There is much more to be read regarding nonprofit Web sites in ENTECH's Ingredients of a .ORG section. Also, if you would like to be innundated by numbers, feel free to explore ENTECH's visitation statistics.

This article is part of the Knowledge Guide to Nonprofit Technology.