The web is now the biggest pre-visit tool for cultural audiences, with three quarters of visitors looking on the website of the museum, theatre or science centres that they are planning to attend before they visit.
Broadly, the function of a cultural website is to convert virtual visits into real ones, or real visitors to committed participants. Like all marketing tools, its effectiveness depends on its reach – you can only start to convey your message to people who are actually looking at it. Ideally you have a number of informed users, heading straight for your site by name or URL. Others should hopefully be channelled by tourism websites, ‘what’s on’ guides etc. But what about reaching more general browsers? In the virtual world where we are guided by the results we get from internet search engines – the so called ‘Google Goggles’ – how do people who aren’t specifically looking for you know that you are there?
Sharpening the focus
Searching for ‘family days out London’ on Google returns 146 million results, while a search for ‘museums in Edinburgh’ gives us 6,250,000 options; neither gives you very good odds of your venue being found, or even listed in the all important first two pages. Some cultural venues are turning to paying for adverts on websites like Google to get to the top of search results, but taking time to make your website perform better can increase your website visitors without draining your advertising budgets.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the art of making your website rank highly on sites like Google, Yahoo and MSN Live for the search terms audiences are likely to use when browsing for your venue. The companies behind the search engines are highly secretive about their specific models of searching, in order to protect their share of the market and to avoid people cheating the system, but there are principles which apply to them all that you can adopt to improve your search engine results.
Keywords and search terms
The first task is to determine the right key words and phrases for your venue; start by thinking what your audience might search for when considering a visit to a cultural destination. This needs to be broader than simply your venue’s name, but not so broad that you expect to get to the top of a search for ‘art’ or ‘culture’. For example, an art gallery in Manchester would want to rank highly for the words ‘art’, ‘Manchester’, and ‘gallery’ appearing together in a search and also for general things like ‘Days out in Manchester’ or ‘School holidays Manchester’, or collection-specific searches like ‘Manchester ceramics’ or ‘Lowry paintings’.
You should be able to see from which search terms people are already finding your venue from your website statistics and so you can make sure you’re making the most of them, as well as including new ones.
Once you have written a list of possible search terms, try them in the top search engines – Google, Yahoo, MSN (who have three quarters of the market between them), AOL, MyWay and Ask – and see how well your website ranks. It is also worth noting from which keywords similar organisations are ranking well, and starting by targeting keywords with minimum local competition.
You then need to consider how these keywords are included in the content of your site. It is thought that search engine attention is particularly concentrated in the first 100 words of every page, where users will also focus. Without overloading the page and spoiling the legibility of the text, it’s worth trying to get these keywords into context. Using the above example, the home page could start with something like ‘Example Art Gallery in Manchester has a diverse collection of ceramics and paintings. We have recently opened a new coffee shop and improved facilities for school visits. Our family workshops make for a great day out.’ The relevant parts of this text will then form the description listed under your museum name in the search results.
Preference will be given by search engines to a page with the keyword text appearing in headings and sub-headings. They will also search the rest of the page text, including captions, and the code in which it is written.
Consider your site as a whole, not just the home page: a search engine is ranking each page in your website separately and should return different results for more specific searches. Though you may have 10 or more keywords for the site as a whole, the limit should usually be five keywords per page – people only search for two or three words.
URLs and page titles
Page URLs should also be ‘search engine friendly’ by being clear about the page content; www.museumexample.co.uk/aerospace not /hall2. Keywords in the URL need to be relevant to a landing page in your site structure – such as an Interactive Exhibitions page which leads to various exhibitions, meaning that users can find these individual exhibitions from a search for ‘interactive exhibitions’ without needing to know their names. Each page of your site should have a ‘title tag’ (the piece of text which is displayed at the top of your web browser or appears as a web link when you search for a site in Google) and, again, these should be search engine friendly.
Links
Each search engine uses a series of algorithms to process the information available and rank the results. Google, for example, has its PageRank system which places significant emphasis on the links to your site and, in turn, the ranking of the pages on which they exist. The more links you have from partner organisations, tourism websites and websites with a similar theme, the higher your site will be ranked by search engines.
Internal links within a website are also assessed; the more links you have to a page, the higher it is ranked. Look at how pages within your website are linked, and make sure that pages relevant to important keywords are linked to from across your website. In fact, some SEOs recommend linking to every page on the site using a text link from another page. The links themselves should be descriptive of what they’re linking to, for example, ‘read about our school holiday activities’. Of course, avoid cluttering a page with links or creating extensively long link titles.
Link titles is an example of several areas where SEO coincides with general good coding practice and positive accessibility practice.
What NOT to do
If the search engines are looking for links to your site and keywords appearing in the content, it might seem tempting to engineer links from partner sites or ‘hide’ keywords in the website where real users can’t see them. Such practices, following the iconography of Star Wars and beyond, are known as Black Hat search engine optimisation (compared with search engine-approved White Hat SEO practices). There are myriad black hat tactics, with some companies dedicated to providing such services, but the search engines are working hard to override them. In some cases, sites, or even all sites from a particular organisation, have been banned for trying to ‘cheat’ their search results.
Measuring success
You can measure your success by typing your keywords in the search engines again and by watching your statistics. It can take time for your changes to affect your search engine results, because, depending on how highly it is ranked, sites like Google may only index your website every six weeks.
In your statistics package, you should be able to see the numbers or percentages of users coming from the various search engines. Most website statistics will also show you which keywords people are using to find your website and watching for changes in these will give you a good indication of when your search engine optimisation is starting to work and any tweaks you need to make.
Conclusion
In theory, with so many variables for tweaking the exact content, coding and structure of your website and then striving for links from highly ranked external sites, you could continue to perfect your SEO ad infinitum. You would also be aiming at a moving target, with Search Engineers continuously tweaking their algorithms and listings and new approaches to searches being launched (Cuil being the latest, from an ex-Google developer). There is plenty of advice to be found on the internet, although with the dynamic and veiled methods of the search engines, some of it is merely speculation and much of it is out-of-date. However, any agency should be building search engine friendly websites as a standard and should be able to advise you on the latest trends and advice.
Search engine optimisation can take time to get right, and should be considered an on-going marketing ‘housekeeping’ task. Even simple changes can make a big difference, increasing website traffic and, ultimately, increasing your real world audience.
Checklist:
- Key words
- Think site-wide
- Introductory text
- Secondary text
- Site structure and URLs
- Title tags
- External links
- Internal links