After you've planned and written your interesting and engaging content, you'll want to tell the world about it. Make sure you publish it where it has the greatest chance of being seen.
Publish a web page
Whether it's an article, an opinion piece or a campaign, give it a home for life by publishing it on its own, separate web page.
Don't publish your content as a downloadable PDF or Word file as you'll alienate a section of your audience. Not everyone uses Word and you still have to manually download and install software to view PDF files. 100% of people browsing your website will be able to read a web page. The only content you should ever publish as PDFs are documents which absolutey must be printed to retain their layout & design, and even then, they should only be offered as an optional extra to web pages.
Why should you publish as web pages? Well, they're:
- the bread and butter of search engines
- easy to link to and to share with friends
- easy to search within
- easy to read, skim read and scan on screen
- accessible to users with specific accessibility needs
...the list goes on!
Put it in a sensible place
Make sure the web page is easy to find on your site. Your website navigation should make sense to your intended audience, amny of whom will have never visited your website before, nor have any idea about what your organisation does. Many will have stumbled upon you by chance on a search engine - reward them with good content that's easy to find.
Don’t bury your work in a section called "resources" or something equally vague and unengaging. How many people visit your website looking for "resources" rather than to read about an issue that's important to them?
If it's an article you're particularly proud of, publish it on the on the homepage. Not everyone visits your website through your homepage, but for those who do, seeing your article here emphasises the work you do and how important this topic is to your organisation.
Get the URL right
Make sure the web address (its Uniform Resource Locator or URL) in the browser bar for that page is plain english and readable by a human.
It shouldn’t have lots of numbers in it, just a plain english, readable version of the title of the article. Only use numbers if you run a blog or news-heavy site, where numbers are useful for identifying the age of an article.
In this situation, Google News looks for a URL with more than three consecutive numbers to validate that the site is indeed news-realted and therefore worth indexing in its news site.
Take this article about staying safe on bonfire night:
www.safelincs.co.uk/blog/2009/10/21/bonfire-night-safety/
The article is clearly labelled as being about bonfire night safety, and is dated 27th October 2009, so we can assume it's recent, topical and relevant.
Google gives weight to keywords in the URL, so it also assumes that the article is relevant to the subject of bonfire night safety and ranks it accordingly.
Consider this page from the British Red Cross' website. It isn't the top result on Google for the term "First Aid in schools" despite the informative content and organisation's reputation.
At the time of writing, the top result on Google was this page from the TeacherNet website.
Have you heard of TeacherNet before? How can they get better search engine rankings that The British Red Cross?
Well, the URL of the page helps.Google has no idea of how relevant the Red Cross article is to the subject of first aid in schools from the web address. Both articles have the keywords "first aid" and "schools" in their titles and in the main body of the article, but only the TeacherNet article uses keywords in the web address. Google therefore considers it more relevant and ranks it accordingly.
This technique also improves the user experience for real people. If you received an email from a friend which said "This is a great website, click on it to read more", which of the following links is more persuasive?
Get metadata right
Every web page contains a hidden set of information called metadata, which means "data about data" and is similar to a library card indexing system. Metadata contains no content itself, but rather information about what the web page, including:
- the date the web page was created
- who wrote it
- the page title
- a short description of the page's contents
- some key words or phrases
This information has traditionally been used by Google (and by all search engines) to index web pages, but due to attempts to cheat the system by using fake keywords, misinformation and deceptive page descriptions to drive traffic to websites by any means necessary, metadata is used less to rank pages nowadays.
Metadata is still important as it is used to present information on search engine results pages.
Make sure you’re setting this information in your web editing program (like Dreamweaver) or your Content Management System. If you don't maintain your organisation's web pages, make sure you provide at least the following information to your webmaster so that they can tag the metadata accordingly:
Page title
Keep it short and use the most important words at the beginning so your reader has the best chance of spotting them and clicking through to your site.
Think about how to title your homeage. Which of these looks more persuasive in a list of search results?
- Home: Welcome to the Example Foundation website
- Supporting the fight against bad examples since 1982: The Example Foundation
Page description
Summarise the contents of the page in a short sentence or two so that the reader knows exactly what to expect when they click on the link.
If no description is supplied, Google will display some body text surrounding the key word(s) used to search. If you want more control over what people see in results pages, make sure you provide a description.
Key words and/or phrases
Key words and phrases help Google categorise your content and decide , along with a range of other information, how to rank your page. Whilst you should still think about your keywords, search engines now place less importnace on them because they’re too open to abuse, opting to scan your actual text instead.
Make sure your HTML is clean
HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the code used to construct and format web pages and is a key factor in both the accessibility of your website and its rankings on search engines.
This is what clean, well-formatted HTML looks like:
<h1>Main title</h1>
<p>Introductory paragraph</p>
<h2>First topic sub-heading</h2>
<p>Paragraph about the first topic</p>
<h2>Second topic sub-heading</h2>
<p>Paragraph about the second topic</p>
<ul>
<li>List item</li>
<li>List item</li>
<li>List item</li>
</ul>
Learning HTML is beyond the scope of this article, but there are plenty of guides, blogs and websites about the subject.
HTML tells search engines what each bit of your content is from the following options...
- Heading, up to six hierarchical levels, with h1 being the page title
- paragraph
- link
- list - unordered list (ul) for bullets or ordered list (ol) for numbers
- and much more.
People traditionally use website editors the same way they use Word - by changing the colour, size, font and boldness of text to make it look like a heading. Unfortuntely, Google won’t have a clue it’s a heading as it doesn't "see" this formatting, it can only use the <p> and <h1>, <h2>, <h3> tags to differentiate between body text and headings.
You must use HTML to set a heading correctly, it is then bolded and resized automatically, then Google knows that it's a heading and considers any keywords here more importnat than in normal body text.
Allow comments
Social media has changed the internet forever. Users are no longer passive consumers of data and expect to be engaged in conversation more than ever.
Allowing commenting on your articles is an easy way of starting a conversation with potential supporters and makes your website look more friendly, approachable and transparent.
It shows you’re taking part in a conversation and respecting other people's opinions rather than just broadcasting a single point of view.
Comments can allow fresh perspectives on your infromation, can fill in the gaps in your knowledge and can be a great opportunity for service users or other beneficiaries to tell their stories.
Don't be afraid of dissenters - not everyone will agree with what you do, but remember that you can also comment on your own website. Tackle negative comments calmly and respectfully and dispel any myths, assumptions or incorrect statistics posted in comments with facts.
Accept that on today's social internet you can't always control your message, but as a charity or nonprofit organisation, transparency is a good thing and being seen to address people's concerns can work to your advantage.
Remeber, if people post negative comments onto your website, they are often frustrated because they believe in your cause but think you could do it better. These people have taken the time to tell you what you're doing wrong and should be considered as valuable feedback.
Google loves articles which have been updated since they last visited your site and rewards them with better page rank. Comments are an easy, low-maintainance way of updating your site's content.
Syndicate
Two technical points to finish off this section about publishing web content. Ask your webmaster about
RSS
If you syndicate your content, you make it available to the widest number of people possible without having to visit your website regularly to find the latest updates.
Many people use newsreader programs or websites such as Google Reader or Netvibes to collect news from lots of different sources into one dashboard. Make your updates available using Really Simple Syndication (RSS) so these people can consume your news offsite. Subscribing to an RSS feed is as simple as clicking on a (usually orange) icon embedded within a web page, or in the browser's address bar.
Any half-decent Content Management System should be able to provide an automatic RSS feed, but your web developer should also be able to create one.
If you're not providing an RSS feed, chances are one of your competitors probably will be.
Google News
If you publish updates regularly, tell Google News about it. The best way is to provide a specially-formatted news sitemap.
Next: Step 4: Promote