An blog article written for the Alberta Camping Association
Does your camp have a good website? Does the quality of your website actually make a difference? Having a user friendly, responsive website with easy-to-find, relevant content that is optimized for search engines is incredibly important. Next to word of mouth, most potential campers and their families will find out about you online. In fact, even if they’ve been told about your camp by a friend or family member, they will search for your camp’s website online before calling you or registering their children for camp. Are you making a good first impression online?
Search Engines for Camps
Regardless of what kind of business you’re in, in this day and age new customers are searching for and finding out about businesses, services and organizations online. Your camp included. Understanding how search engines works will help potential campers and researching parents find your camp, and make sure your organization is performing better on search engine rankings.
How to search engines work?
In the presentation, Search Engine Myths for Camps, the presenter compared search engines to robots. Imagine a robot that spends all day browsing the internet reading various websites. When it visits your camps site it will attempt to ‘read’ your website to determine what your site is all about. Then it will decide how popular or important your site is to searchers. It will use all of this information to decide whether or not your site is relevant to those searchers entering specific phrases or keywords and if it will show up on their search results.
Search engines will look at the code of your web content to determine its relevance. If it can’t read the code, it can’t read the content and that is why having clean code is important. Search engines can easily read error free xhtml, css, and some javascript but can’t read flash. If you were to look in the ‘text’ editor of your flash based website you will see that there is virtually no content for the search engine to read. If your website has bad code the search engine automatically decides it’s an unimportant site and ranks it lower. Speak to your web developer about your code, or if your website was created by a staff member or volunteer, ask them about it.
Besides having clean code, having good content is equally as important. Search engines are looking for good content. Remember that they can only read, so images mean nothing to them, however alternative text/tags and image titles are required for good code and can be read by search engines.
How to Improve your Camp Website Rankings
Determine your main users. Think of your potential campers, parents, schools and user groups. What questions to they ask when they call you on the phone? What kind of information are they looking for when you run into them at a trade show or conference? Make sure your website answers these questions and answers them clearly and concisely.
Web users should be able to easily navigate your site. Have the most important information on the homepage or in the main navigation menu. Information regarding camp schedules, programs, and contact information should be incredibly easy to find and not too many ‘clicks’ away from the landing page. By creating a ‘hierarchy’ to the pages you can make the most important pages the most accessible, and then give access to sub-pages through drop-down menus from there. Keep it simple and don’t have more than three tiers on our sub-page menus.
Improve your content. Keep it short and simple and remember that people usually scan content looking for the information they require. Use bold headers and sub-headers to make important information easy to find. Your web copy should include a few instances of keywords or phrases. Do not list keywords or force them into sentences. Use them naturally within your content. In fact, having too many instances of your keywords can actually harm your rankings. Fix any spelling and grammar mistakes and give useful, original information. Do not plagiarize content from other organizations.
Get your camp’s website on popular websites and directories. Popularity is key for appearing on the first page of search engine rankings. You can ‘tether’ off of big, popular websites by having links to your website on theirs. Members of the Alberta Camping Association will be listed and linked in our directory. Get on other websites by joining your local chamber of commerce and submitting your website to established, industry specific business directories. Use social media networks like Facebook and Twitter to get more links to your website out on the world wide web. It’s also important to have links to other websites within your own content.
Google is the number one search engine and the most used in the world. Second to Google is YouTube, which is owned by Google. If you improve your search rankings on Google, other engines like Yahoo and Bing will follow.
You can also submit your content to Google. This will allow you to increase visibility and optimize your website for searches. Google makes it very easy for you to add your URL, label your content to help users find pages relevant to their search and submit a sitemap of your website to google. You can publish your local content to Google Maps and Google Places. Having a listing on Google Maps will help your camp’s website show up in searches without paying for Adwords. Click here to learn how.
There are Google Grants available for non-profit organizations that grant $10,000 per year to use towards Google Adwords advertising. Your advertisement will appear on the top of the search engine results page and along the right sidebar. Google support forums will teach you how to properly use Google Analytics and Adwords so you can build and design ads and campaigns that will work best for your camp’s online marketing. The best part is that this grant is on-going. Learn more about Google Grants here.
If you’re unable to design a website using proper code or create good web content, you might want to consider hiring a professional web developer. Although the initial cost might seem expensive for non-profit summer camps, you will see a return on that investment over the years. Incorporating that cost into your annual budget should be considered.