Search Engine Optiimization | SEO | Search Engine Optimization Of Your Surveys
Search
Engine Optimization of Your Online Survey
Introduction
It may appear to many people
that the major search engines are able to root out and display information from
every nook and cranny of the Internet but in reality the search engines are
very polite and will not retrieve information if they are asked not to.
It can sometimes be desirable
for private surveys to be found via search engines but for surveys like internal
employee satisfaction surveys, the opposite is true.
With Survey Galaxy you have
the choice.
Preventing Private
Surveys from appearing in Search Engine Results
The default for all private surveys
is to prevent them from being indexed by the major search engines such as Google,
Yahoo and Bing.
With the 'Enable Search
Engine Indexing' set to 'No' the following HTML statement will
be included with the survey: <META name="robots"
content="noindex"> The statement will instruct all 'polite' search
engines not to index the survey. (Polite search engines are those that respect
the conventional methods used to prevent content from being indexed).
The default setting should be used
if you do not want the survey to appear in any search engine result listings.
This is likely to be your preference if you wanted to restrict the people that
participate in your survey to those that are invited to do so by email or via
a link placed on a restricted access website such as an Intranet, Extranet or
the authorised area of a public website.
Including Private
Surveys in Search Engine Results
If you want to maximize
the exposure of your survey and make the survey a candidate to appear in search
engine results you should set the 'Enable Search Engine Indexing' to
'Yes'.
This is likely to be your preference
if your survey is open to the general public and you want to encourage those
people searching on the survey's topic to participate in the survey.
You should think carefully
before allowing the survey to be found through the search engines as the results
might be skewed in favour of a particular viewpoint. For example if a survey
was published that gauged the attitudes of people towards the issue of smoking
in public, it is possible that those that might be searching using related search
terms may not represent an even balance of opinions 'for' or 'against' the argument.
This may, or may not be, to the advantage of the survey's publisher.
Examples of search terms displaying surveys
Jed Bartlett is a fictional character in a US TV series, The West Wing, the
following is a search for 'Jed Bartlett US President'
A search for the 'Which heroes super power'
Optimising
the Survey
To maximise the opportunity
for the survey to appear in relevant search results consider the following:-
| Survey
Title |
The survey
title is important and will heavily influence the search engines in their
decision as to how relevant the survey is towards any particular search
phrase. |
| Introduction |
Having a short SEO
introduction at the top of the survey will improve the chances of a survey
being returned for relevant search phrases. A well optimised introduction
will read well to the respondents and at the same time provide the search engine with detailed
information about the survey topic. |
| Links |
Private surveys will
benefit from Survey Galaxy's own ranking with the search engines but the
more links a survey receives from independent sources the greater the chances
of a private survey improving its search rankings. |
Before any of the major
search engines will index your survey you will need to have at least one link
pointing to the survey. There are a number of ways this can be achieved:-
- Place a link to the survey
from your own or third-party website
- Include a link from a
Blog
- Publish an online press
release containing a link to the survey
- Publish an online article
containing a live reference to the survey
Benefits of SEO
If your survey is open to
the general public allowing the search engines to index your survey may help
improve the volume of respondents.
Surveys can be used as a
marketing tool to promote a product and/or a service and/or used as link bait
to send traffic to a website either by including a link to the target website
from within the survey or by specifying an 'Exit URL' for the survey.
Guarantees
There are no guarantees
as how well your survey will perform in the search engine rankings. A lot will
depend on how competitive the search terms are and how well you have optimised
the title and introduction as well as the number, and quality, of the links.
Warning
Although you are able to
dynamically set 'Enable Search Indexing' through Survey Galaxy using
the survey's 'Edit Detail' option please note that once a search engine
has indexed a web page its removal from the search engine index is not immediate.
Each search engine has its own procedures for removing URL's from their index.
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