Online Support Groups

Lesson 3: Getting Members To Join Your Group

Submitting To Search

Search engines may get around to finding your group and listing it on their search engine, but why wait for them? Maybe you have never had to submit anything to a search engine before, and you might not be sure how to do it, or what to say about your group. Don't worry, it is not a difficult as you might think.

Open two or three browser windows and go to your group's home page in one, and one or two search engines in the others. You should go to the search engine you use the most first as it is probably one of the more popular ones. Another good place to submit your site is to the Open Directory Project, which other search engines will use to update their listings.

Once you have a couple of search engines open on your extra browser windows you need to create a description of your group that will not only inform searches of what it is but will also draw them to your group. Your description should not just repeat what your group welcome message is. Here is an example of a poor description:

We are a good group to join. We talk about online courses, and we are nice people. You will learn lots, so join us.

Does not tell you much does it? How likely would you be to join a group you found in a search engine with that kind of description? I wouldn't either. So, what does a good description look like?

The Yahoo group, Online Courses, will discuss how to locate the course you are looking for, offer hints and tips on how to get the most out of any online course, and you can see the ratings we have given courses we have taken and rate courses you have taken too. All of this with friendship, understanding, and support!

Do you see the difference? The second one offers more information and is more inviting to the person looking for information.

The next thing to concentrate on where search engines are concerned are key words. Key words are the words and strings of words that people enter when using a search engine. And don't forget that people are not always the best spellers, so adding misspelled key words should be done as well.

How do you know which key words to use? First, think about what you would type in if you were searching for information about your group's topic. For an online course group, the following are examples of possible key words, including misspellings:

online, course, information, education, ratings, internet, cource, info, educashion, support, group, friendship, schools, school, courses, on line, learning, lerning, rate

This should give you an idea and help you with generating your own key words. You can also do a search for a 'key word generator' on any search engine, which will help you with creating a list of key words to use.

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