President’s Message

You'll not be able to miss the AGM notice on page 4 of this issue. I
hope you will also see that several of the board members have been
volunteering their time and energy for three or more years. They

Take your
friends,
take your
family,
take your
students;
Learn what
excellence in craft
really means.

continue to do great work, but, if we want our organization to continue
to be vibrant and energetic, we need some new members every year. I
am seeking new members who can help the guild reflect the nature and
meet the needs of the membership.

I have just spent a wonderfully inspiring weekend at the Shadbolt
Centre. Iam sure everyone would agree with me that the Symposium
was fabulous! Such a wonderful selection of presenters! Congratulations
to Cathi Jefferson and Sharon Reay and their army of volunteers, of
whom there are too many to list here. Thanks for all your hard work.

One last word: If you live anywhere near the Lower Mainland, even
if you have to cancel something on your calendar, go to the Burnaby
Art Gallery! Tam Irving’s exhibition Still Life 1s not to be missed—it
is, quite simply, exquisite. You have until April 15th; take your friends,
take your family, take your students; learn what excellence 1n craft really

means.

Jinny Whitehead

Techno Tip: Getting Noticed by Search Engines

I received an interesting question from a fellow member
about making your website more effective and visible
with the Internet search engines like Google or Yahoo.
Here’s what I’ve suggested. (Watch out, lots of techno
terms tossed about).

You do need to do a few things to make it easy for the
seatch engines to find you. The most basic thing 1s to add
some seta keywords and meta descriptions on your webpage
(home page is a must). Be careful if you also use frames,
which hide the actual content pages. If so, you'll need to
ensure the meta info is on the top frame as well. I don’t
know how familiar each of you are with web pages, so
if this is a little beyond what you understand, run it by
the person who put together your website for you. Search
engines will often use these keywords and descriptions to
index your site for searching, though mote so in the recent
past than now. Search engines have evolved and are more
complicated now than before.

The search engines will scan text from your webpage and
index that for searching and when it changes or updates,
the search becomes more relevant and will be ranked
higher and will come up earlier 1n the search results. So
one of the keys is to also have text content that is about
yout pottery on your page. Use of the ALT description
tag on your images 1s very useful as search engines do not

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recognize images easily for search criteria.
So, if you can update and change your
website fairly regularly, itll also get better
search results.

The search engines don’t always go to
your site and pull this information out
(called crawling): You'll often have to
help them out by submitting your website
to Google, Yahoo or wherever. There’s a
free web-based submission for you to do
this and of course a fee-based one. As
you might expect, the fee-based one will
guarantee that you get on the top of the
search results list.

For Google, go to http://www.google.
com/addurl/ to submit your website. The
free submissions will put your info into
their search index, but you can be sure
itll come up higher after the fee-based
submissions. There are numerous  fee-
based services that specialize in helping
you submit your website to search
engines. There are a few that are free and,

of course, more comprehensive ones for

continued on page 5

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