I've been hearing a lot about
Search Engine Optimization lately. Most recently, Stephen Abram mentioned it during his presentation at MLS last night.
I noticed more than a few people scribbled down some notes when he mentioned this phrase.
Ultimately, it all boils down to putting yourself in a position to be
found by the search engines.
Lansing PL's website has (only) been around since August 2001. We're not even 4 years old yet!
But... Search on Google, Yahoo or MSN for Lansing Public Library (you don't even have to use quotes) and guess who's the
#1 result on all three?
Yep. Lansing Public Library
in Illinois.
Not Lansing, Michigan libraries, but our library in little (pop. 28,000) Lansing, Illinois.Aside from the occassional e-mail from a patron who can't get into their borrower record (because they're trying to use their Michigan barcode in our database) its pretty cool.
For those of you that are thinking that the Google/Yahoo/MSN ranking isn't the end-all be-all, keep in mind, that you're trying to increase your presence
where your patrons are looking for you.We didn't pay a company to submit our site to search engines.
I used the
free metatag generator from
Submit Express and pasted the code into each page of our website. Once you see the generated code, its a piece of cake to edit it to
customize the metatags for each page of your website.Visit some of our pages to see what I mean.
Open
http://www.lansing.lib.il.us in your browser, then (in Internet Explorer) go to the View menu, and choose "source." The metatags are at the top of the page labeled "meta name" keywords and description. The keywords are the search terms a user could use in a search engine. The description is what displays in the search engine results list.
Think like a patron. Use keywords they would be likely to use to find your site. They might spell out Illinois, or they might abbreviate as IL. Use both in your tags.
Take a look at some of the sub-pages of the site to see how the tags differ for the programming page, or the Adult Services Department.
Once the meta-tags are there, the search engine spiders will find you.
If you build it, they will come.If this sounds like a lot of work, it's not. It's well worth the effort.
Related note: Stephen said last night that 95% of all users do not go beyond page 3 of the search results. Our Village just paid (big) bucks for a website, and
their web designer did not metatag. Search
Lansing Illinois on Google and it's
not listed (I got bored after page 11 of the results) Search
Village of Lansing and its #4 on Google. Me personally, the first instinct was to search city and state. Too bad that lots of people probably can't find the
$$$ site.
