The art of getting search engines (google.com, bing.com, yahoo.com) like your site is called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short. As Google is the leading (some claim a 80% market share) search engine, you can say that SEO is the art of getting your page among the ten first hits/the first page on a search result at google.com.

If you are in the category of people who want more readers on your site – take SEO seriously … or forget about SEO (read on for explenation). Search engines can potentially be the primary gateway to you site. But how?

First; a lot of companies provide SEO in their product list. And some even guarantee  you a high ranking. This is no-go. The most important steps are possible for you to take, as a tech-zoombie. The philosophy is that search engines want favour good websites – not search engine optimized websites that is using every dirty tricks in the book (this blog does not cover this book). And the search engines today are very good at telling wether you are a dutiful, honest content provider or a cheater. So the conclusion is: forget about SEO and focus on making a good website.

Since we have been talking about making good websites in previous posts, I could end this article here. But since dutiful and honest are relative attributes, I will give you a list of some things to think about (not tricks):

• Use headings and links carefully. Carefully means:
  • Headings should explain what the content is about. What terms you use in the heading matters.
  • Links should have meaningful texts. “Click here” is senseless without context. Don’t expect search engines to see the context. The link text should give the user a proper expectation of what the link leads to.
• How often you update your website matters. New content is what your readers and search engines want.
• The structure in your text is important. Search engines want you to prioritize your content with important stuff first. Second, use sub-headings (tech alert, h1 – h3).
• Google is ranking your website with a score from 0 to 10. This is called PageRank and can be explained like this (simplified): If a lot of significant websites (read highly PageRanked) are linking to you, we suppose you are significant and we will give you a high PageRank. The PageRank is in the next turn used when Google decide wether you deserve a place among the top-ten. Check out your PageRank on this site. How do you get other sites link to you? It’s easy: write interesting stuff!
• Advanced search engines use social media to decide wether your content is worthy a high rank. So, use social media. How? We’ll get back to this in another post.
• Since linking to other relevant websites makes the web a better place to be, search engines like that you do that. Your reward is higher ranking on the search result.
• Google have made a tool for webmasters to show you how to improve and make a better page. Worth checking out.

References/further reading:

• http://searchengineland.com/guide/what-is-seo
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization
• http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=no&answer=35291
• http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php

A Content Management System (CMS) is essentially a system for managing the content on your site. As an administrator on a site you typically log in to a restricted area and modify different parts on your site. Easy-peasy.

But, wich CMS should you choose? There is really a forrest of CMSes out there (take a look at this list to get an idéa), and they comes in all shapes and models. Basically you have the free (open source) CMSes and the proprietary CMSes. Free does’nt necessarily means bad. A good open source CMS is often handcrafted by hundreds of volunteers and gone through thousands of revisions over several years.

Here are some preferences we think is important when you choose a CMS:

1. Is the CMS well known in the market? Is the CMS in use on a large amount of sites? If yes, probably many developers knows the CMS and it is easy for you to get help when you need it.
2. Are the developer community building the CMS up and running – or dying? A CMS constantly need to change and adapt the evolution of web, so a large, active community is important for you to have a CMS for the future.
3. There are different CMSes for different needs, such as CMSes for e-comerce, blogging, wiki or news publishing. Choose a generic CMS that don’t put constraints on you.
4. The functionality, of course. You have a lot of things you want to do on your site, and you want to use functionality some one else have planned, developed and tested.
5. The architecture – how it works under the hood. This effectively put constraints on how good a CMS can be in the future. However, an active community with a lot of capacity can compensate this.
6. How well the administration panel is designed. This is the tool you will use every day, so it better work!
7. Performance. How many visitors can the system handle at the same time?

There is a lot of CMSes we could mention in this blog. We have better things to do, so we will point out one CMS wich is a very good chioce for small scale websites like all of the YWAM sites (at least in Norway) is: WordPress.

WordPress got these answers to the questions above:

1. Yes. Worpress say that 25 million people have choosen them. Thats quite a lot of people.
2. Absolutely alive. Both active and huge.
3. Quote from worpress.org: WordPress started as just a blogging system, but has evolved to be used as full content management system and so much more. WordPress is limited only by your imagination. (And tech chops.)
4.  Wordpress is organized in a way so it is very easy for developers to add or tweak functionality with plugins and themes. A plugin can be anything from a simple shema to a Facebook competitor. A theme is the design – the look-and-feel. Since everyone can add plugins and themes to WordPress, the quality may vary a lot. You often have to test many to find something that suit your needs.
5. This is a weak and strong point for WordPress. Since, as mentioned, WordPress has evolved from being a simple blog tool to a full CMS, it still carry along some design “flaws” deep in the architecture. But the future still looks bright – because of the community. My prediction is that the energy in the project is strong enough for WordPress to survive. Talking about architecture, WordPress is smart built with an easy way to “hook” in functionality wherever you (as a developer) want.
6. Good enough!
7. This is a weak one. If you have a site with a lot of traffic (lets say 3 millions or more hits per month), you either use a lot of time tuning WordPress, you use a killer server, or you choose another CMS.

That said about WordPress, there is other good open source CMSes out there. Drupal, ez Publish or SilverStripe to mention three. The power balance is shifting, so maybe we update this blog with a different advice in the future.

Further reading:

• Comparing Open Source Management Systems: WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and Plone
• Wikipedia

At some bases around 70% of the students find their UiO-school through web, so there is no doubt web is important.

Here are some best practices on how to make a good website:

• Point out goals for your site. A goal could typically be for a Ywam base site; give potential students a great impression of our base. Or; make it easy to find information about DTS on our base.
• Get to know your visitors!
• Explain important topics/terms with small chunks of text. For instance; describe in few words what a course contains, before your detailed description.
• Relate to the reader. Use “you” ten times as often as “we”.
• Do priorities according to the needs of the user. For instance; if the application schema is what mostly visitors are looking for on your site, make it easy to find on the front page. Dare to ask general questions on every element on your page; why is it there, why is it like that? Here it´s crucial to know your audience.
• Links are what holds your site together. All links on your site should enable your visitor to perform his/her tasks effectively. The link text should give the user a proper expectation of what the link leads to. Web is a fast media. Make it easy to get an overview over your content, give short answers, get to the point early in your text.
• Think collection pages rather than advanced menu structures. Users are not afraid to scroll vertically, and a page containing everything important about a topic generally gives a better overview than many pages with a small pice of information on each page.
• Don´t be afraid to link to other sites on the web. The idéa of “keeping the customers in the store” is from the 80´s. You can´t keep your visitors on your site anyway, so having good links to other sites improves the user experience and is the best you can do to make it more likely for the visitors to come back. Besides, search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) appreciates that you links to others and ranks you higher beacause of this.

References/further reading:

• http://iallenkelhet.no/2009/08/06/bra-innhold-pa-1-2-3/ (norwegian)
• http://iallenkelhet.no/2010/09/29/7-grunner-til-at-vi-snubler-med-innhold/(norwegian)
• http://www.webmonkey.com/2010/02/information_architecture_tutorial/

Facebook is the most widely used social media service on this planet, and there’s not many under the age of 25 thats not there. It should be self explanatory that this is an arena YWAM must be well represented. But how should we use Facebook? We will highlight two concepts for now.

Pages

Pages is ment to be the place where musicans communicate with their fans, stores communicate with their customers and organizations communicate with their members. Large companies use the Pages-concept as their support channel – the main place where they get feedback from their customers and they share vital information. How you maintain and form your Page is critical for how many Facebookers that want to follow your page. Here are some advices:

• Lets start with an easy one: remember to put contact information and a link to your website on the info field.
• Publish short and interesting news (wich you got a lot of) on your page. It will keep your followers updated about you. Look at every news from you as a message to your followers.
• Be very careful not to spam! Your follower don´t use their feed from you like an RSS-feed where you scan the headlines before you read. 2 – 3 messages in a week is a good number.
• Get personal and laid back. Relate to your followers – when you feel like, say “have a nice weekend”.
• The Page is about dialog not one-way-communication. It is super duper as a support channel and works great for questions and answers.
• When you have a lot to share, don’t publish everything – put it on your site or blog and refer to it with a link instead.
• Like the mantra is for making a good website; think audience. Get to know your followers and communicate their way.

You also have the Group-concept on Facebook. This is mainly something the fans put up for their idol, the customers put up for their beloved product. Your role here as a YWAM unit, person or base, could be to encourage students or others to create groups. Let they maintain them and concentrate on the Page.

Ads

Besides getting in touch, ads is the other good reason to be on Facebook. The ads service on Facebook makes it possible to specify the target of your campaign in a way not possible many other places.

You could for example specify it like this:

This is an effective way to reach those who might be interested in what you have to offer and is used successfully by a lot of websites, companies and organizations worldwide.

Twitter is a great way of communication because of the format; 140 characters. The way of communication is meant to be spontaneous but at the same time forcing people to weigh their words. So far Twitter has been dominated by celebrities, IT professionals, designer and people from other creative professions. This may change, but at the time being Twitter will probably not be the place where YWAM gets in touch with potential DTS students.

The reason for us to comment on Twitter, other than it’s popularity, is the format. Publishing news is often seen as one of the burdens of keeping a web site, and using Twitter for some or all of the news publishing may change some of that. The two usual ways of tweeting (posting a message on twitter) is either to write the whole message on 140 characters or to put only the title and the link to the actual article. We think that using Twitter will both allow those one Twitter that’s interested to follow YWAM (nationally or locally) there, and at the same making it easier and less of a job to update the site.

Our proposal based on this is to use Twitter as a channel for information, and have your YWAM website pull information from the Twitter account – making it easier to update your website “on the go”. If you are using WordPress as your publishing system, we found this plugin that does the job.

To shoot in the right direction, you need to know who your audience are. Every element on the site should reflect this;

• How you prioritize your content.
• How you form your text – make it understandable, readable and interesting.
• Which languages you support.
• Graphic design.
• What kind of social media you are on.

To get to know your audience, you need to know who, where, when and how they use your site. The easiest way to do this, is to use a tool for monitoring your visitors. The defacto standard tool for this is Google Analytics. The tool is free for small scale sites and is very easy to install. You simply create an account at analytics.google.com, and add a small chunk of code at the bottom of your site. For more detailed statistics (eg. how a buttons is used), Google Analytics have great possibilities for this with a little extra coding effort.