DEVELOP Develop Introduction Hosting Considerations Content Management Promotions Maintenance and Updating Maintenance Checklist

Development - Promotions

How are visitors going to find your new educational website? Print your website URL on all your museum literature including brochures, ticket stubs, and newsletters. Post the URL on the museum floor or paint it on a wall. Share your website URL with professional associations. Post your URL to listservs and connect with your communities by linking your website to other community based websites and have other websites link to yours.

Search Engines and Meta Tags

When you purchase a website domain name, you are buying sole proprietorship of that name for the term of your registration contract. The more your domain name is used, the higher your website ranking will be on search engine tools such as Google, Yahoo, or Altavista. About 50% of traffic to a website comes directly from search engines. A new website domain name may rank near the end of the search engine list unless you either purchase placements on search engines or insert Meta tags into your HTML code.

Meta tags are descriptive words hidden in the HTML code of your website. Search engines look for Meta tags across the Internet. If your site's Meta tag matches a word that the search engine is looking for, then your museum website will be pulled up. Only about 1/3rd of pages on the Internet currently use Meta tags. Choosing the right descriptive words and inserting Meta tags on each page of your website can have significant results for visitation.

Meta Tags

Meta Tag Guide
Meta Tags

Search Engine Guide

Best Search Tool Page

Search Engine Rankings:

Position Agent part of Submit it!

You may improve your website's ranking with search engines by posting your website URL to educational indices such as these:

Canadian Museum and Education Indices

Canada's SchoolNet Learning Resources (Education)

Canadian Heritage Information Network

http://www.virtualmuseum.ca/

North American Museum Indices

• The Exploratorium's Ten Cool Sites (Science, Art, Education)
• The Internet Scout Project (Education)
• Tech Site of the Week (Technology, Science)
• Eisenhower National Clearinghouse Digital Dozen (Education, Math, Science)
• SBC Blue Web'N (Education)
• MuseumStuff.com (Museum)