[Adta] a shift in our culture to embrace the body-based arts? dancetherapy

[Donna Newman-Bluestein]

Sorry, Susan. I meant to send this out to the whole listserv.
Donna
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Donna Newman-Bluestein 
  To: skdmt2 
  Sent: Monday, July 30, 2007 10:16 AM
  Subject: Re: [Adta] a shift in our culture to embrace the body-based arts? dancetherapy


  Hi Susan and All,

  What little I know about search engines, I'm learning by searching the word "octaband" to see who's talking about it, and whether or not my new blog about dance therapy is coming up, which it isn't yet. So I will know a lot more in the near future, and I intend to post it when I do.

  However, I kept a copy of the following post on the listserv by Brett Debney. It's a bit technical maybe if one doesn't have a website, but I think that the part relevant to this immediate discussion is that our listserv does come up on searches, and I believe only based on the subject line.

  So putting "dance therapy & prison dances" with a subtitle would be much more useful in enhancing our visibility than, say, "[Adta] RE: Adta Digest, Vol 21, Issue 29".

  Thanks, Brett, and maybe you can tell us more.

  Donna

  22 Dec 2005 13:40:22 -0500
  From: "Brett Debney" <mbdebney at triad.rr.com>
  Subject: [Adta] Linking and Keyword Searches
  To: "ADTA" <adta at adta.org>
  Message-ID:
  <200512221840.jBMIeIWe010379 at ms-smtp-01-eri0.southeast.rr.com>
  Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

  Last month, Susan Kleinman initiated a discussion around "Linking." In the
  course of this discussion, Donna Newman-Bluestein posed a question about
  "having these books, articles, etc. respond to keyword searches" on the
  internet. Here is my response.


  SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
  FOR A LINKS PAGE

  Definition: Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, refers to the act of
  optimizing a webpage and/or web site to perform well in the search engines.

  NOTE: If you have a website designer, do not assume that they already know
  all of this. Think of it as Form and Function. Your average website designer
  specializes in Form. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) relates to Function.
  Most website professionals specialize in either one skill set or the other.

  A. DEVELOP YOUR LINKS PAGE:

  Develop a web page (or a series of web pages) that contain the links/
  listings for all the various resources you want to centralize (such as DMT
  book titles, articles, etc). To see examples of my own attempts at
  centralizing some DMT and other information via a "links page," check out:

  http://www.apsaracounseling.com/links.html

  http://www.apsaracounseling.com/DanceMvtTherapy.html

  Note: I have not submitted these URL's to any search engines yet (step #1 in
  "C", below), because the pages aren't optimized yet (see "B", below).

  B. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION - IMPROVE YOUR RANKING

  "Ranking" refers to where your website ranks on a search engine's Results
  List in response to a keyword search, i.e. page 1 versus page 36. The
  different search engines use their own very complicated and sophisticated
  algorithms to determine ranking. However, some of the more basic components
  are:

  1) KEYWORD RELEVANCE: For example, if I have Dance Therapy listed as part of
  my page's keywords, but then that phrase does not appear anywhere in the
  content of the page, my ranking will likely be negatively affected.

  2) INBOUND LINKS: The number of inbound links, i.e. other sites that link
  back to your website. This is one of the purposes of the Dance/Movement
  Therapists section of my Links page
  (http://www.apsaracounseling.com/links.html) - it's a sort of trade, where
  we each place links to the other on our respective websites.

  3) UPDATED CONTENT: Frequency with which the website content is updated.
  This is why you repeat steps 1-4 below - so that the next time the search
  engine "crawls" your site (see "D", below), it sees that you have new
  content, which can knock you up a notch (as opposed to a site that hasn't
  been updated in years).

  Ranking is KEY if your goal is to be found via keyword searches. This is why
  people hire people to do this - because it's such a pain in the
  you-know-what!!!

  C. SUBMIT YOUR URL

  1) SUBMIT the URL's for your webpages (URL=http://www...) to the various
  search engines. For the pages that I have submitted, I used
  www.scrubtheweb.com, which submits your URL to several search engines all at
  once.

  2) WAIT several days/weeks (depending on the procedures and popularity of
  the search engine) for the search engine to "crawl" your URL (see "D",
  below).

  3) Begin doing Keyword Searches from MSN, Yahoo, Google, etc... to test
  whether your page has been "crawled" yet. Continue to perform Test Keyword
  Searches every few days (or every few hours if you're impatient/neurotic
  like me) until you finally see your site somewhere, even if it's on page 36.

  4) Update your website content, and then repeat steps 1-3

  5) Repeat steps 1-4 every few days/weeks to help improve your ranking (see
  "B", above)

  D. CRAWLING:

  This refers to the process a search engine goes through to see what's out
  there. There is a queue of submitted URL's (step #1 in "C", above) waiting
  to be crawled. The search engine goes through the queue; it takes a look at
  the URL's website; then it updates both the content and the ranking (see
  "B", above) of the URL in its own records/listing (or if it's a new URL, it
  adds it to its records); then it moves on to the next URL!

  DISCLAIMER: All the information above is based upon my own personal
  understanding of the process (i.e., I'm not a website professional). An
  actual website professional might find my explanations horribly inaccurate
  or misleading or even just plain wrong!!!

  Hope that helps.

  Brett 

    ----- Original Message ----- 
    From: skdmt2 
    To: 'Donna Newman-Bluestein' ; 'Julie Miller' ; adta at adta.org 
    Sent: Monday, July 30, 2007 8:48 AM
    Subject: RE: [Adta] a shift in our culture to embrace the body-based arts? dancetherapy


    Hi Donna

    You said:... "One thing I think we can do to help ourselves as dance therapists to become more visible is to put dance and dance therapy in the subject line of our e-mail messages. Do people know that our subject lines come up on searches? We should use this knowledge consciously."

     

    Great idea & not hard to implement. Can you tell us a bit more re how the search engines work?

     

    Susan Kleinman, MA, ADTR, NCC

    ADTA Listserve Respondent

     

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