A fiercely independent media source, Sasquatch will be suspending its publication due to financial strains and a generally challenging market. Editor Shayna Stock summed it up best when she wrote,

“This has been a difficult process for everyone involved, particularly because the need for independent media in this province is still so acute, and The Sasquatch, though barely out of its infancy, was already punching far above its weight. The more unbalanced and divided our world becomes, the stronger the need for democratic, public-interest journalism that holds power to account and presents practical alternatives to the status quo. It is painful, then, to close down a new publication that directly addresses that need.”

Well said, Shayna, well said. To all those involved with the publishing of The Sasquatch, thanks for being part of an important dialogue. We will miss you!

 For instance, let’s say that you’re sitting at your computer when you hear a knock at your door. You get up, open the door and see a politician running in a local election. Now let’s say you’re sitting at your computer and you see that the same politician is following your twitter account, or has added you as a friend on Facebook; or maybe they made a comment on your blog. To which are you more receptive?

 Consider how great the influence of social media on the global political scale. There are several countries around the world that have placed grave restrictions on freedom of speech, the freedom of dissent, and on independent media and engaged citizens. Places that are currently in a state of social upheaval, but where people face restrictions in speaking out, are using social media as a way to get their voices heard. This is happening in China, Iran, Israel, North Korea, Palestine, Russia … even in Mongolia to a certain extent.

 In locations where government seeks to commit repugnant acts against its residents without impunity, social media is facilitating the circumvention of restrictions, once again giving rise to the voice of the populace – whose views are neither valued not wanted by oppressive regimes that seek to silence them.

 However, is this access to the world (through the internet) changing the ways in which governments act and create policy? To be continued…

Now for the hard part… is it possible to be succinct enough to have a cooking column on a blog?? Stay tuned!

IG

As always, if you have any questions, please leave a comment!When most people use the phrase ‘web technologies’, they are talking about the three technologies at the center of how the internet looks and works.  These technologies are:

HTML – HTML stands for HyperTextMarkupLanguage.  HTML’s primary purpose is physical layout – it is for placing elements on a page and providing basic interactivity.

CSS – CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets.  CSS is about presentation – it is how things look and how text/images are formatted and presented.

JavaScript – Javascript is mainly used to make web sites interactive.

These three technologies work together to make most web sites look and behave the way that they do.   If you ever want to learn more about web technologies, I strongly encourage you to check out Opera’s wonderful Web Standards Curriculum.  The Web Standards
Curriculum starts slow – it covers design/usability considerations, moves into HTML, then through CSS and JavaScript.  I highly recommend it as it is a great learning tool.

My last article was an introduction for non-profits that are thinking about building a web site – it talked about some of the things non-profits can gain from going online and about some of the tactics a non-profit can use to achieve those goals. Then, it delved into a discussion on why planning is very important.  This article is going to continue that theme with a more in depth discussion of planning.

Here is the first step in building a web site.  Answer these questions:

1. Do you have enough money to hire someone to develop the site or will this be ‘do it yourself’?
2. What is your budget for the site (including hosting)?
3. Why do you want to build a web site?
4. What do you hope to gain from your web site?
5. How many people do you want to visit your web site in a month?
6. What do you want on your web site?  Do you want a blog?  A static information page?  A forum where your users can talk?  An events calendar?
7. How will you keep the content in #5 fresh enough to meet the performance goals in #4?

These questions are important because they will help you focus on your goals for your site and how you will design the content to achieve those goals.  It also gets you thinking about some of the specific tactics you will adopt to put that content online.

Once you have an idea where you are going (and how you will get there), it is time to focus upon how people will find your site.  Does your non-profit have a recognizable brand name that people will search for?  Or, do you want people to find your site by searching for an issue you are involved in?

These questions are important because they will get you thinking about your ‘domain’ name.  What is a domain name?  Consider our site – our domain name is reginastreets.ca.  We chose that one because it is the name of our non-profit magazine.  That magazine will be our primary way of promoting this site (and this site exists to promote the magazine, but that is a different story).  Since our site and magazine are so closely linked, we felt it was important to make our domain the name of our site.

Now, let’s say that our name wasn’t such a big part of our strategy.  Let’s say that we wanted to inform people about a particular cause.  If that were the case, it would make much more sense to find a domain that was related to that particular cause.  For example, if we were focused upon protecting widgets, a good domain name might be protectwidgets.com, or preserve-widgets.ca.

This article has accomplished a few things.  You know what you want to call your site and you have a good idea of what you want to put on your site.  You have also written down some numbers that will be very important later on.  First, you wrote down your total budget.  And second, you wrote down how many visitors you want to get in a month.

Why Should Non-Profit Organizations Go Online?

• Exposure
• Community Building
• Control
• Permanence

More on Your Internet Strategy:

Exposure – Exposure is all about increasing awareness – it is about grabbing people who have never heard of you, attracting them to your web site and teaching them all about your organization.  There are billions of potential supporters, partners and/or volunteers out there – they just have to get to know you, your cause and your organization.
Community Building – Exposure is about bringing new people into your organization – community building is about serving the people you already have.  A web site is a great way to communicate with your supporters, partners and volunteers.  It can also be a great way to develop relationships, brainstorm, share ideas and plan events.
Control – Control can best be summed up with an acronym – ABR – Always Be Relevant.  A web site is a great way to be able to change your message to suit the times.  And, it can be a great way to comment upon news/events that affect you and your organization.
Permanence – Sometimes, when you start a non-profit, your ‘business address’ is also your home.  A web site adds a sense of professionalism, a virtual location and a feeling that your entity is permanent.

Depending upon how much time you have and your organization’s goals, you may choose to focus upon one or two, or you may choose to devote equal time and effort to all four of those main areas.  To make planning a little bit easier, I have made a list of some tactics that are associated with each of the above strategies….

Each Strategy Has Associated Tactics.  Here are Some:

Exposure – search optimization/marketing
Community Building – social optimization
Control – pick the right content management system
Permanence – pick the right web host/domain name

Sounds confusing, doesn’t it?  Don’t worry, I’m going to explain each of those over the rest of this series.  My goal in writing that was to give you a framework to study what follows.

You have to know where you are going if you have any hope of getting there.

This means that you must plan, plan and plan some more.  Devote time to thinking about why you are going online and what you wish to accomplish when you are online.  You also have to think about how you are going to reach those goals and what specific tactics you are going to employ.

Building a Web Site is Like Going on Vacation (and if you think it is just as fun, you need help):

Part of going on vacation is figuring out where you are going and how you are getting there.  Building a web site is no different.  Best of luck…

Canopy - June 2009 Issue

While this site currently runs Wordpress only, we have some serious changes waiting in the wings.  What you see is a default templated version of one small section of the larger dream for reginastreets.ca.  My plan is to eventually adopt dual Content Management Systems (CMS) to run this site – the magazine will be run on Wordpress, but the rest of the site (the business directory, the event calendar, our Guide to Regina Downtown, and the associated Google Maps tie-ins) will run on a CMS called Joomla.  Complex?  Yes.  A cool experiment and learning experience?  Definitely.

I know much more about Joomla than I know about Wordpress and the Joomla forum is one of my serious online hangouts.  Joomla was actually a big factor in the formation of my open source for non-profits concept, but that is another topic for another time.  A very interesting topic came up in the Joomla forum and this article was born moments after reading it.The forum post in question started as a question about title tag conventions and morphed into a discussion of keyword research.  Since keyword research is one of my favourite subjects, I decided to turn those few posts into a more substantial article.

For the purposes of this article, we are going to restrict our access to Google.  Google is the biggest search engine out there and it is also, in my mind, the absolute best.  While it is quirky (see the hidden meaning behind the phrase ‘Google Voodoo’?), it is also dead accurate (most of the time).  As such, it is a good place to start – great results in Google can easily turn into great results in other engines!.

Google provides three really great tools for keyword research.  They are Google Adsense, Google Insights for Search, and Google Trends.  Each is a little bit different and I will briefly cover each in this post.  Additionally, while each uses the same data, they also reach different conclusions and provide slightly different recommendations.  It is always wise to consult as many data sources as possible.

Finally, in our examples, we are going to use the keyword, “child poverty”.  You can use these methods on any keyword you like.

Google Adwords

Google’s famous cost per click advertising vessel comes pre-equipped with a powerful tool for keyword research.  See the screenshot below for an idea of some of the information you can get from Adwords.

Google Adwords Screen shot - Child Poverty

As you can see, Google Adwords is a great place to start.  It also gives you a good idea of how many people search for a certain term.  Finally, it is a great tool to generate some more ideas for keywords – without this, I might not have thought about targeting my content towards the term ‘child poverty statistics’.

Google Trends:

With keyword ideas in mind, your next step should be Google Trends.  Google Trends gives you several key pieces of information – it shows you historical trends in search volumes, as well as what parts of the world search the most for certain keywords.

Child Poverty - Google Trends Graph

If you scroll a little bit further down the results page, you will get a chance to see geographical information on search popularlity.  Trends gives you a chance to look at what parts of the world search for a particular term the most.  As this picture shows, that information is broken down by country and by city:

Google Trends Shows What Parts of the World Search for a Particular Term the Most

Furthermore, Google Trends lets you analyze the trends in a particular region of the world.  This graph shows search volumes for the term, “child poverty” in Canada:

Search volumes for "child poverty" in Canada

With Google Trends and the Google Adwords Keyword Research Tool in your arsenal, you can make an informed choice when it comes to targeting Google traffic.  These tools can give you an idea of how many people regularly search for a particular term.  They will also show you if people’s searches follow a particular pattern.  For example, are volumes going down?  Do they follow a regular pattern?  Or are they on the upswing?

Moreover, these tools can be useful for brainstorming and getting new ideas for keywords to target.  Sometimes, getting people to your non-profit (or other) site can be as simple as changing the words you regularly use in your titles and your content.

However, if you wish to push your research into another level, you have access to Google’s most advanced tool – Insights for Search.

Google Insights For Search

If you want to dig really deep into a particular keyword, Insights for Search is going to become your absolute best friend.  However, before we dig into Insights for Search, I am going to warn you that the statistics you get from Insights For Search will not always match the statistics from Google Adwords and Google Trends.  In other words, no matter how proficient you get with it, do not use Insights for Search on its own – always validate the data with at least one or two other terms.

There is one other note – Google Insights for Search assigns a number to search volumes.  I think that too many statistics cause problems for beginners, so I prefer to encourage newcomers to look at these numbers as absolutes.  However, seasoned pros will want to know that they are not absolutes, that they are normalized to help show broad trends in search volumes for that particular keyword.  The idea is simple – the month with the highest search volume will be assigned a number of 100 and every other month will have its volume expressed in a percentage of the highest month.

Confusing, hey?  Look at it this way:

Let’s look at a nonsense search term – ‘ blah blah blah blah blah blah blah’.  100 people searched for that term in January 2007 – that was the highest volume ever.  In May 2009, only 80 people searched for that term.  May 2009 would be assigned a value of around 80 (80/100 = 80%).

To avoid getting too bogged down in those numbers, I encourage you to look at those numbers as absolutes, and to always focus on what appears to be the average.  For example, consider the Google Insights for Search report on ‘child poverty’:

Google Insights Graph of Child Poverty Searches

The highest volume was in Nov. 2004.

If you look carefully (and run your mouse along the graph), you will notice that the graph follows a fairly regular pattern – it bottoms out every July and August.  It also reaches regular peaks in November and March/April of every year.  This graph is fairly predictable and the numbers are safe – people regularly search for child poverty so if you write good content about child poverty and properly promote it, you will get traffic to your site!

Finally, I think it is important to look at the ‘average’ of the data.  There is a scale on the right side of the graph – always look for sort of an average on that scale.  In the last graph I showed, I’d estimate that the ‘average’ is around 50 – 55.  Now, take a look at this graph, which shows the search volume for the term, ‘UNICEF’.

Searches for the term "UNICEF"

Take a look at recent results – their average has been between 20 – 40 for the last two years!  Clearly, a few months saw massive results – what happened in those months to spur that sort of search volume?  Can anything be learned?  Are certain terms falling out of popularity?

The point of this is that if you are going to invest time in a keyword, it is wise to make sure that that keyword will return results.  When given a choice between a few keywords, why would you devote your time towards those keywords that are getting 20% of their highest search volume?

Conclusions:

We have information from three sources, now let’s put it all together and analyze it.

“Child poverty” is an easy term to predict.  Canadian and world-wide results (from different sources) all follow a pretty stable pattern.  Results drop in July and August and reach their highs in November and March.  Moreover, traffic has been quite stable.  When compared to a term like UNICEF, child poverty’s traffic has not bottomed out.  Recently, it has been reaching 50-60% of its best ever traffic.  UNICEF, on the other hand, has recently been averaging around 20% of its best traffic.

The next steps, from a traffic point of view, are to analyze why these swings happened.  For example, why does search volume drop in July and August, but reach heights in November and March/April?  Is this a sign that traffic on child poverty normally comes out of school assignments?  And why has UNICEF experienced such an incredible swing since its high point?  What happened in January 2005 to create five times as much traffic as it receives now?  Or, is that term just terribly unpopular for political/cultural reasons?

Finally, I have shown you three tools and given you a few applications for these tools. Your challenge is to take that information and use it to figure out what kinds of words to use in your titles and opening paragraphs if you want to start getting consistent traffic from search engines. Next article I write on keyword research will take these numbers with some information on keyword difficulty and put it all into a spreadsheet. Then, we will use this spreadsheet to estimate traffic and to generate a metric to help you decide what keywords to target.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask….

The RSM is a street publication, founded in the tradition of great street publications like the Nashville Contributor and the Edmonton’s Our Voice.  I helped start the magazine and remain heavily involved – I write articles, edit articles do the layouts and work with/recruit our vendors.  So, once again, why am I writing about search engines?I have always pictured myself working with non-profit organizations, especially those that are involved in the publishing industry.  And this series, which I affectionately refer to as ‘open source activism’ is the first step in what I hope will be a career of service.  My goal is to educate and support – to help non-profits take their first steps into the internet and to stand behind them to assist them with any issues that they may encounter.

So, what does that have to do with search engine optimization?

Search should be the first thing you think about when you plan a website.  Google is unbelievably powerful – if you build your site properly, Google will introduce you to the world.  But too many people do not build their site properly and they sit back and wonder why nobody comes..

Over the weeks and months to come, I hope to introduce all aspects of search optimization – from the simple to the difficult.  I also hope to answer some questions, walk people through some open source tools and give you enough information to start your own ‘publishing company’.

Be peaceful.G