I learned something that I ought to have known at the SLM in Summerlin this June!

In passing I feel I ought to say that I was very encouraged by this meeting as a whole. It was a positive and forward looking and I think edifying (meaning up-building) meeting and I hope more people will post their own thoughts on what happened.

I gave a short report to the Pubs Dept meeting on the launch earlier this year of the new on-line ISA Directory of Automation which came on stream a few months ago. The URL is isadirectoryofautomation.com/

One of the delegates asked if he could enquire why a new URL, rather than a “subdomain” of the ISA URL – www.isa.org was used. I said he could ask, but I had no answer or defence, principally because it never occurred to me that this was an important point (and I could hardly be called a neophyte in this web game!)

Nobody could give an answer other than it was perhaps an easy one to remember. (The same may be true for the URL for Automation Week (.isaautomationweek.org/) and other sites set up by the ISA with URLs other than the main www.isa.org).Perhaps this was thought as a good idea in helping to establish their identity. However it was pointed out that this was perhaps a false theory in the modern on-line word.

Using these disparate or different URLS instead of strengthening the ISA “brand” by establishing one strong authoritative presences, instead dissipates the possible presence into many different channels.

Does this matter? Well, yes it does.

Have you ever tried to “google” the word “Automation?” If you have where do you find the ISA’s website? Try it now if you like! In my experience it is on page three or four or maybe even further down. In fact it ought to be in the first three entries on page one. Now try “Automation Directory” and see if you can find it. We tried it at the meeting and failed to find it after seven pages! (By the way I think that if you’ve searched for this before some search engines are intelligent enough to second guess you and move up what they think you might want further up the hierarchy! – I stand to be corrected in this but I find if I use one computer to do a search and then another I tend to get different results!

Why is this?

The search engine is looking for usage, or how popular a page or site is. So isa.org has a certain number of visitors, so will the Directory of Automation, so will the Automation Week site. But the search engine has little to go on to associate these with each other has it? Remember the adage “garbage in garbage out?” Or have you ever experienced a problem with having printing done by a professional printing firm where simple mistakes are made because you assumed that they understood exactly what you wanted without spelling it out clearly. No search engine, however intelligent, cannot identify www.isadirectoryofautomation.com, or www.isaautomationweek.org with www.isa.org. The URL isa.org does have an existing authority with the search engines but when we start another URL this is from scratch rather than building on what we already have. Each new URL has to establish its own authority from nothing. Reinventing the wheel as it were.

So what to do?

It is actually a quite simple procedure, I’m told, to change this to say “automationdirectory.isa.org” or “automationweek.isa.org”. If this is done then every visit to both of these sites will acrue and be recognised as a visit to the isa.org domain and so its perceived popularity will rise and its “authority” will grow as this total increases. And so on, the addition of each section as say england.isa.org (or isa.org/england), or district say district12.isa.org etc will add the usage of these sites to the total. Say 10000 people visit isa.org and 2500 people visit www.automationweek.com and 5000 people visit the Directory they would be regarded as separate entities by the search engines and thus would be back in the exterior darkness of the back pages of Google, Yahoo and the rest of these engines.

ISA has a global presence with potentially 14 District web presences, all the sections, divisions and departments as well as some of the individual standards’ and education sites. All these can and I would suggest should be contributing to this popularity. Hopefully as a result of that simple question at the pubs meeting we will see the authority of ISA rise in the eyes of these engines and start to take its rightful place on page one.

Popularity: 9%

Tags: branding, Directory of Automation, Districts, Domain, Google, Search Engines, Sections, URL, web presence