For information about FaceBook, see How to clear the Facebook Share cache in this guide.

How do I get my site to appear in search engines?

While this is a constantly changing topic, a good overview is that this is a combination of having the search engines crawl and index your site, as well as optimizing the content on your site. It is a good idea to read through the help items from the major search engines.

Here is more information from:

Google:

https://www.google.com/support/webmasters/?hl=en

Bing:

http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster

Sign Up for Google's Webmaster Tools

On the Google Webmaster Tools site, you can find courses and guides, support documentation, and a tool to help you analyze your site, Search Console.


Verify Your Site in Google's Webmaster Tools

Verifying your site to Google means that you prove ownership of the site.  Once verified, you can gain access to private Google search information about your site.

You can verify your site by adding an HTML meta tag to Website > HTML Head.

To do this, please follow Google's instructions for getting your HTML meta tag.

Be sure to use the Alternate Methods and select HTML Tag.

Add this meta tag to your RescueGroups.org website:

  1. Log in to your account at RescueGroups.org and click the Login button.
  2. Click on Website  > HTML Head.

  3. Click Edit.
  4. Paste the meta tag in your Page Header HTML.
  5. Click Save Website Header and Footer.

Return to Google Web Master Tools. Click Verify.

Add Google Analytics to your Website

These instructions have been updated to work with the recently released Google Analytics 4. Currently, the RescueGroups.org Affiliates feature cannot be used with the latest version of Google Analytics.

With Google Analytics, you can see which pages people view the most, where they came from (search engine, other websites), which pages they viewed, how long they stayed on each page and how they navigate through your website.

In Google:

In your RescueGroups.org account:

Return to your Google Analytics account and you should be able to confirm that it is collecting data. 

More Search Engine Optimization Tips

Optimize your Web Page Content

Keywords

Search engines no longer place a high value on keywords in the meta area, instead, they place more relevance on having those keywords or keyword phrases appearing organically on your page. There is a rule of thumb to how those should be used - it needs to be natural. You don't want to overuse your keywords/keyword phrases or you could get penalized.

Formatting text on a page.

Write better anchor text

Anchor text is what tells users and Google something about the page you're linking to.

Images

Optimize your Web Page Titles

When you type into Google (or other search engines), the title of your page plays an important role in what viewers see.

The title of the page is the first part of what a viewer sees in the search results. You want to make it clear what the page is about so a viewer will quickly know if that is the page they are looking for. Google also uses this information when indexing your page and ranking your page.


Add Meta Description's for Each Web Page

The excerpt below is from the Google SEO Starter Guide PDF:

Custom URL's, Google-friendly URLs

While the RescueGroups.org website service does not support customizing the URLs, you can have great SEO results by following the rest of the tips and suggestions.

You can use Page Forwarders for marketing materials and easy to type in URLs. For more information, read the chapter, Using website forwarders.

Sign up for Google's Adwords Grant

http://www.google.com/grants/

What is Google Ad Grants?

Google Ad Grants is the nonprofit edition of AdWords, Google's online advertising tool. Google Ad Grants empower nonprofit organizations, through $10,000 per month in in-kind AdWords™ advertising, to promote their missions and initiatives on Google.com

Open Graph

http://ogp.me/

The Open Graph Protocol enables you to integrate your Web pages into the social graph. The structured data you provide via the Open Graph Protocol defines how your page will be represented on Facebook. Open Graph tags are added to your Website via Meta Tags. The type of tags used should represent the content of the page. For example, Your homepage tags would contain content about the site as a whole, while tags on an event page or blog post would focus on the nature of the story.