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Turns out, I had not enabled the site to be crawled and indexed through the WordPress backend. I think I did this initially because the site was in development for a while and had a bunch of dummy text, so it made sense at the time. Of course, now I want the site to be indexed, so I went to the privacy settings on the WordPress dashboard and selected “I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers.” Hopefully this will do the trick and we’re back on the right track.

A few real SEO tips

So, sense you took the time to read about my SEO snafu, you are probably interested in some actual SEO tips. A lot of people spend a lot of money and time trying to get their site at the top of the search list. This is for good reason: unless you have a highly motivated searcher, they’re probably going to select one of the options that shows up on that first page. While Google’s (and other search engine’s) page ranking algorithms are somewhat of a mystery, here are three common sense things that you can do to improve your SEO:

1. Content is king: The best thing you can do to turn the search engine’s onto your site is to have relevant and useful content. I can’t make this point strongly enough. While there are tons of gimmicks and magic bullet solutions out there, the search engines actually do a pretty good job of figuring out where the most useful content is for web users. Your doing great work already, so talk about it in all its uniqueness and particularity.
2. Spread your web: One of the things search engines are looking for is who is linking to your site. They want to know that your site is interesting to a wide audience and having links to your site from other reputable sites can help. You might work with partner organizations, or have foundation support, make sure that these organizations link to your website.
3. Pay attention to keywords: While meta tags are not as important as they used to be, crafting a consistent message that utilizes regular keywords is. Search engines pay more attention to what is in the title of each page and to the content that is in header tags than to the content toward the bottom of your page. Like a good newspaper journalist, think about grabbing the attention of your audience—and the search engines—in the first few sentences of your post or page. I know, you’re a social change worker, and it takes in depth analysis to understand what’s going on in our world. But, we still have to get people on the site. Use language that is accessible and useful and specific keywords that can drive people to your site.