At our Club meeting on September 8, the web-master (Ron Baxter) reported on the current status of the web-site, and how we could improve it.  

This report shows that the web-site is performing reasonably well, but there is plenty of room for improvement by

• getting more and better quality content
• getting our web-site referred to by a greater number of other web-sites like other clubs
• using our web-site more actively for seeking help with funding
• finding new ways to reach out like possibly Facebook or more mailing lists

Keep reading for the details.

In May we migrated the content from a server in Amsterdam to a server in Arizona - this has gone smoothly, and there is now much greater storage available for content including photos.   However, our web-site name is still registered in Europe and this needs to be moved.

The site has

• 190 articles - and this grows by about 10 per month
• 690 photos (124 MB of storage) and this grows by 20-30 per month.
• Google reports that it sees about 480 web-pages (the 190 articles can be arranged on web pages in different ways - this is how you get more pages than articles)
• the Google web-master report shows our site is reasonably friendly for search engines, but there is room for improvement

Does our site show up well in searches?

We check this by entering some keywords in Google search and see how far down the list of results our web-site is.  Most people see 10 results per page, so if we don't get in the top 10, we often won't be seen since people often will not go to the 2nd page of results.  Here are some results

Overall, our site does well with many keywords related to our projects - but some keywords that people may use (charity or service, for example) don't work well.

How many web-sites refer to us?

In science, the merit of a scientific article is often measured by its citation index - how may other scientific articles refer to it.  Google have used the same concept to create Google Page Rank which goes from 0 (no visibility) to 10 (a very visible web-site).  The news site cnn.com is an example of a 10.  The page rank not only depends on the number of links - but also their quality and relevance.  To find some of our links I use Google to search for rotary-bali-lovina.org. Some that crop up are listed with my subjective star rating of the quality and relevance of the link.

Our Google Page Rank is 2, whil the Seminyak club gets a 3.  If you do a similar search on them you find twice as many links with more Rotary Clubs, Facbook and Friendster pates, more local businesses, and more foundations that they work with.

How can we improve?

1. More articles that are good qulity, meaning they use our keywords, they refer to other relevant sites, etc
2. More photos with good captions that include keywords
3. Get more references to our site on other web-sites.  We can do this by sending links of our articles to other clubs in the hope that thye will quote them.  Similarly with foundations that we work with and local businesses.
4. Use our web-site more directly for marketing - that is seeking partners who can help with finding of potential projects.
5. Reach out to more people, particularly younger people - would a Facebook page help here?
6. Reach out more through mailing lists - Maybe we can build a list from all the email addresses we get from visitors.