Helping people find the TMS Wiki

Thank you for your kind words, North Star. They mean a lot. I remember that back when my TMS was at it's worst, I would have given anything to be healed. Now that I have gotten my life back, it is my dream to help others achieve the same thing. I figure that if we are lucky, we have a chance to do something really special in our life. For many people, that is raising a child, a task I have the greatest respect for. Without any children of my own right now, this nonprofit has definitely become my baby!

@Ellen, when it comes to helping people find us on search, I think that you've hit on something crucial. How can we help people if they can't find us?

I think that it is best to divide searches into common or "head" searches and uncommon or "long tail" searches.

Common searches (aka "head searches")

For the common searches, like "back pain" or "neck pain," there will be incredible competition among websites for those searches. We will be facing off against corporations who make a great deal of money off of those searches and who may have annual budgets of millions of dollars. Nonprofits can actually do quite well on searches like that, though, because people like linking to them because they are respected and trusted. Google takes these links as a vote of confidence, and nonprofits often show up near the top on some health-related queries.

Given this, our competitiveness on these searches will depend on the overall strength of the TMS movement. Google uses more than 200 signals to evaluate which pages to show searchers and to do well on highly competitive searches like "back pain," you have to do well on all of those variables. Practically, this means that we have to build a stronger TMS movement.

Key to this will be a strong group of practitioners, because practitioners give the movement respectability in the eyes of the media, the public, and other practitioners. About a third of our programs (by time spent) are for building up a community of practitioners. Authors and practitioners often have very strong opinions and so we work to find a common space and community to bring people together. The hope is that by partnering with them, the overall movement will grow faster. This will help us do better in the 200 signals that Google uses.

Tying things together, there are 23 practitioners on our Find a Doctor or Therapist list who have websites. Most of them are on our email mailing list for practitioners. They may also read our newsletter for practitioners, participate in our bimonthly teleconferences for practitioners, or have seen one of my conference presentations or our pamphlets. Over time, more and more of them will link to us from their own sites. This will affect two of the very most important signals that Google uses. First, Google takes each link as a vote of confidence in our site and therefore assigns us a higher PageRank. Second, when they link to us, they will use certain words, such as peer support, in the link. These words are called anchor text. Then, when someone searches for "peer support," Google will know that we are about "peer support" because of the anchor text. This could have helped with one of the search queries that you mentioned. (PageRank and anchor text are also very important for tagging, as I'll explain below.)

Bottom line: as we build a stronger movement and a stronger nonprofit, Google will be able to figure this out, and we will show up more and more on common search terms.

Long tail searches

Long tail searches are our "bread and butter." For example, consider Pandamonium's success story:
http://www.tmswiki.org/ppd/From_Wheelchair_to_Ice_Skates:_My_Success_Story,_by_Pandamonium
Panda wrote:

The word "long tail" comes from probability theory, and is being used to refer to search queries that are uncommon. For example, there aren't that many searches every day for "annular fissure," at least compared to "back pain." Therefore, "annular fissure" is a long tail search term, whereas "back pain" would be an example of a "head" search term.

Forums, like ours, do exceptionally well on long tail searches, because, with many thousands of pages, we probably have a page that matches a specific query pretty well. For example, occasionally people will type something like "neck shoulder elbow pain" into Google. That would be a good example of a "long tail" search term, right? I mean, what percentage of Google searches have all four of those words?

Well, we do exceptionally well for search terms like "neck shoulder elbow pain" because we have a really tremendous thread with those search terms in the title:
http://www.tmswiki.org/forum/threads/pain-in-neck-left-shoulder-arm-elbow.827/
When I just checked, we came up as the fourth result for that search.

Google has been sending a steady slow stream of new visitors to that thread for years. In the last month, for example, it has sent about 300 visitors just to that thread. People who didn't know what to do and typed "neck shoulder elbow pain," "pain in my neck, elbow, and shoulder," or "left shoulder and neck pain" into Google will find that thread, about 10 times a day, and may learn about TMS because of it.

It's an excellent thread, telling a powerful story and Google has decided that it likes that thread, probably by monitoring variables called "dwell time" and "click through rate." I'm pretty sure that many threads like that one, because they are inadvertently optimized for specific long-tail searches, are an important way of getting the word out.

Tagging can help with this. Suppose you add a tag like "neck pain" or "annular fissure" to a thread. This immediately does two things. First, it adds a link from the tag page to the thread. Old threads have very few links to them, so this link will be viewed by Google as a vital vote of confidence, increasing the thread's PageRank. It also adds link text, because there will be a link on the thread with the important keywords. Google will then start monitoring the page to see, if it sends visitors, do they click through (that's the click through rate). Likewise, to they take time to read the page before doing another search (that's dwell time). If Google decides that the page is good, it will send us a steady stream of visitors.

In this sense, given that we are a forum with an absolutely huge amount of content, I think that tagging will be very helpful for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It will help Google find our very best pages for long tail searches.

Bottom line
There will always be people who won't find out about or won't accept TMS. Having worked pretty intensely in this field for five years, I think that the way to maintain one's sanity is to measure success not in terms of the people who we can't read, but in terms of who we can.

If we were able to maintain the number of people we were helping, I would consider myself a very lucky person to be able to participate, because I know what it is like to live with the fear of TMS and I don't think that anyone should have to.

Being a numbers guy, though, I have to look at the numbers. I've been working pretty much full time on the nonprofit for about five years now, and I can't tell you how rewarding it is to see the progress that we've made. The following graph indicates the referrals that we get per month from Google for the last two years:

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For the first half of 2012, we were at about 3000 referrals from Google per month. It has steadily been growing since then with 9931 referrals from Google in November and a whopping 13,965 in January. The vast majority of these are for long tail search terms, exactly the types of things that tagging will help with, given the massive size of our site.

We have been building an terrific community here at the TMS wiki. We have an amazing team that is committed to spreading the word and helping people learn about TMS. I think that there are bright things ahead!