Tag: ranking

Categories
Tutorial

Web Search Engines

After you have spent time creating, updating, and improving your Library Web site to “Full on Fabulous,” maybe you want people to find and use it…

As a test, go to Google or Bing or Your Favorite Search Engine and look for your site.  Look for it as “Anytown Public Library” and “Anytown Library” and “Anytown Library Kansas” and any other combination of terms that a library seeker may use.  What do you find?  Are there other Anytown Public Library’s out there, say in another state, competing with your site?  Does your site appear on your City’s site, or some other referring site?

The easiest way to improve your results in Google and Yahoo! search engines is to register.  If you have changed or purchased a domain name for your site, you may want to register the new name.  Each search engine has an online form for submitting your Web site to their index:

Google:
http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

Yahoo:
https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit

Also, if you found in your initial testing that there is community or City site that refers to your site, make sure it is up-to-date.  Call, email, whatever it takes – your library Web site is an Amazing tool for promoting the library and you want to make sure people have the right address.

As librarians, we catalog and classify things.  How do we catalog and classify our Web site?  With metadata!  Depending on the WordPress Theme you use for your site, you may not have an easy way to add your own site description and keywords.  Luckily, there’s a plugin for that!

You can do a search for “metadata” from the Plugins section of your site’s dashboard or from the WordPress site.  That’s how I found and installed this:  http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/add-meta-tags/.  Using this plugin, I added a site description and keywords to a KLOW site.

Out of curiosity, I did a simple search for ‘improve search engine results’ and came up with a few dated, but easy-to-read articles on the subject that might be of interest to you:

Again, out of further curiosity, I did a search for “library web site promotion” and found this interesting web-based, self-paced module on Library Marketing from the Ohio Library Council: Introduction to Marketing the Library :: Libraries on the Web Section

Let us know if you have found any interesting or unique ways to promote your library Web site!

Categories
Events

Making Your Website Pop!

Jane Purcell, senior vice president of Advanced Access, a Web design and hosting firm in Anaheim Hills, California, says “I equate (having a good website) to a car. If you don’t put gas in it and get regular oil changes, it won’t perform for you. The same goes for the Web, where sites that aren’t useful or current do little good for their owners.”

That said, how do you make your site “pop?”

Here are a few ideas:

  1. Use strong headlines – Write engaging headlines that speak to the essential needs of your patrons, such as “Got Kids? Need a peaceful moment? Come to storytime!”
  2. Keep it up to date – there’s no point for your patrons to come to your website if there’s nothing new for them to look at. Keeping it updated at least every couple of weeks keeps your site fresh and interesting for patrons.
  3. Keep your information accurate – There’s nothing more frustrating than out of date content or bad links. Check your content every now and then, your patrons will thank you.
  4. Write patron centered copy – It’s their library, let them know that! Use you and your, instead of I and we.
  5. Write in an inverted-pyramid style – list what essential services your library provides first (the basics), and keep the details at the bottom. They’ll read down to the nitty gritty if they are really interested.
  6. Use small, context sensitive pictures in your posts – Not every post needs a photo or a graphic, but it can make your site look and feel a lot more fun. KLOW makes this easy as you can upload a photo to place on any post. You don’t have to use only photos, you can use royalty-free clip art as well (see the post below) to make a point or draw attention to a particular post.

I’m sure you have many ideas on what makes websites pop… what are your ideas?

Photos in Posts

Nobody likes to wait for photos to download on a website, so if you’re uploading photos that are directly from your digital camera, likely they are pretty huge and will take a long time to download. There’s an easy way around this — resize them!

I found a handy online tool that will let you easily shrink those files down to a more manageable size both for you to upload and for your patrons to download.

Continue reading “Photos in Posts”