How to Promote Your Web Presence
So you'd like to promote your department's web presence? Here are some ideas:
Use Noticias Regularly
Use the City's "Noticias" news and events
database to publicize
certain aspects of your pages, and announce every time you make
major changes to the pages. Remember, new users visit the City's
website every day - especially the home page. You could also use
Noticias to remind website visitors of information and services
that already exist. (i.e. Did you know that you can see real time
flight information on the City's website? ...) Make sure you ALWAYS
link from the Noticias entry to the appropriate website page for
more information. Make sure you use a photo whenever possible.
Read more on the Noticias
Tips Page. The City's website has about 10,000 visitors
each day.
Take Advantage of Email Traffic
- Add the City's website address to your "signature" on outgoing email. Have everyone in your department do the same.
- Ensure that the City's website address is listed on every single promotional item that comes out of your department, such as news releases, brochures, posters, flyers, business cards, billboards, t-shirts, vehicles, pamphlets, etc.
Make Sure Your Webpage is a Good One - Designed around user's
needs
Make sure the content on your website is simple, clear,
and concise. If the user feels as though they're being exposed
to bureaucratic speak, they'll probably leave. If the information
is not easy to find, and intuitively organized from the user's
perspective, they'll probably leave.
Home Page Coverage
Speak with the webmaster regarding temporary home
page coverage for highlighted projects.
A quality image is required for coverage on the City's website
home page.
Search Engines
Make sure your pages are well recognized by search engines. Here
are some further ideas to share with department
website liaison:
- Engines give H1 tag (header 1) more weight in importance. Make sure the H1 is strong and well written
- Don't use your keywords more than 8 times on a page, including the title and meta tags and the text. You could be penalized.
- Frames, Flash and image maps cannot be read by engines.
- For your description tag, 180 characters max.
- Keywords tag: 15 max.
- Include misspellings in keywords tag: http://www.searchspell.com/typo/
- Check your stats - your most useful are most accessed pages, referrers, number of pages average viewer goes to.
- Ensure contact exists throughout your site. Some engines feel you are not legitimate otherwise.