Optimisation Tools for your Association or Not-For-Profit Organisation: Part:4

In part 4 of utilising search engine optimisation (SEO) for associations and Not-For-Profit organisations, we will be looking at meta data and how to best use that website page function on your association website. How to name your images and file uploads to get the best possible optimisation will be explored as well as tips on how to link internally within your site and the benefit of using <alt> tag images.

META data

Your website pages have a field Meta Description which displays in the search engine (Google’s) results. If you do a Google search, you will see a blue page title with a link to the site, a green link with the domain name then in black, information about the webpage.

If your Meta data is well written, this is where it will appear. In general it is then best to make the Meta description a sales pitch that will encourage browsers to pick your site over others.

Images and File uploads

When uploading an image or a file to your website, use a descriptive term including keywords, instead of pic1, pic 2, file 1, file 2 etc. This will help you find your files more easily and help with search engine optimisation. It is quite easy to rename your images or files before uploading, by highlighting their name, right clicking and choosing ‘rename’.

Alt Tags - Images

An <alt> tag is the alternate text that describes in words what is on the screen. Search Engine crawlers as well as readers for the 'vision impaired' will use this <alt> text instead of showing the image to read your website content.

Again it would be good to include some keywords when adding <alt> tag descriptions to your images to verify to the search engine that your page is about that keyword. This doesn't mean you should just use keywords in the <alt> text; try and put together a well-structured sentence describing the image.

Links within your site

Use links within your text to link to other pages within your website. Ensure the words that you put the link on are chosen carefully (keywords are better). This tells the search engines that these words are more important, not only because they have a link on them, but if the word with the link matches to the page it links to – there will be more benefit.

Stay tuned for more tips on how to best optimise your association's website next week.