Every July, I carry out an analysis to see how the websites of TUC affiliated unions compare for their perceived ‘authority’. This is a technique used in the Search Engine Optimisation industry to estimate how influential a website is. The previous years can be seen here: 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013 and 2012. The more a union’s website is linked to or shared online, the more important it is seen by search engines like Google. This usually results in higher rankings when calculating search results. I’ve used the leading Domain Authority metric compiled by Moz. They actively monitor

If you work on or manage a website there is a useful procedure you can carry out to audit your site, especially with regards to how well the website might perform in search engines. It is called ‘Crawling’, an established technique used in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Website crawling is the process where software, usually called a ‘spider’, ‘bot’ or ‘crawler’, travels through a website, scanning and collecting information. These ‘crawlers’ follow links and discover pages, images, content and metadata etc. Major search engines, like Google and Bing, will constantly be crawling the web to

Every year I carry out an analysis of the websites of all the TUC affiliated unions to compare their perceived ‘authority’. I compile the results into the trade union website league table (see previous results: 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013 and 2012). I use metrics that indicate how influential or authoritative the website is. This is done by analysing how often a website crops up in a link or a mention across the internet. For example, a site with lots of mentions on social media and links from news outlets is judged to be more ‘authoritative’ than a site with fewer back links. These

Every June, I update the league table of trade union websites. The 2018 edition can be seen below (Previous results can be seen for 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013 2012). It's important to note that the league table doesn't attempt to review and score the quality of each site directly. Rather, I use industry leading metrics to measure the influence of each site. These metrics look at how many back links a site has across the internet to judge how often the site is being mentioned. The more influential the linking website, the greater the perceived influence of the website. This year, I've used

When websites are redesigned or restructured, one mistake I come across a surprising amount of the time is a failure to use redirects properly. I’ve recently seen this happen on a large, authoritative website for a public sector body. Why are redirects important? Well, when a website changes the address of content or a resource, often as a result of a redesign, then existing links to those resources from other websites, search engines, and social media platforms, will break – unless a redirect is put in place. For example, a webpage address may change from: www.examples.guide/important

A couple of years ago, I looked at the sizes of the websites of all the TUC affiliated unions, to see how they compared. I’ve found myself coming back to this analysis quite often. Various unions have wanted an idea of how large their website is compared to others, or have wanted to judge how their website has changed since a redesign. As a result, I thought it would be useful to update these metrics. For the sake of this comparison, only pages publically indexed in Google are included. It is impossible to include members’ only pages, so please be aware of this limitation. Also, some pages may

It’s time again for the annual trade union website league table. So how have the metrics changed in the last 12 months? (Previous results can be seen at 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013 and 2012). The league table doesn’t judge the quality of the website directly. Instead, it uses leading industry metrics to measure how many times the website is linked to and shared on other websites and social media. The more mentions and links a union’s website gets, the more influential it is considered to be. With a well search engine optimised site, this leads to higher placement in search engine results and more

If ten years ago you were asked what the next major trend in website design would be, not many people would have mentioned ‘responsive design’. With the iPhone yet to be launched and the iPad another three years away, people were still happily building websites that worked on a fixed size. It took quite a few years for website development companies to start adopting the practice of making websites that automatically adjusted to the screen size, a now well-established technique called responsive design. Throughout that time, I saw some organisations spend large sums on websites that missed this

It's been 12 months since I last updated the Trade Union website league table, and so I've complied the latest metrics below (previous results can be seen for 2015, 2014, 2013 and 2012). The league table uses established industry metrics to measure how many links (and the importance of these links) each of the TUC-affiliated unions receives from other websites and social media platforms. It does not attempt to measure the quality of the actual union website itself. Websites that score highly are much more likely to appear higher in Search Engine Results. Search engines are the biggest source

If you want to attract more visitors to your website, then one effective approach is “link baiting”. This is where a website features content that is so compelling that people want to link to it through their own websites or social media accounts. This not only increases your visitor potential, but also boosts your website's overall performance in search engines, as sites receiving more links are ranked higher in search engines like Google. Blogging is a great platform for this. I've recently been working on the new FBU and Prospect websites, and we've made blogging far more prominent in both