I have been known to brag about the search engine ranking of my club websites and use that as a selling point for Toastmost, the WordPress-based club website hosting service I created as a spin-off of my work with clubs and districts.
The purpose of this post is to share search engine optimization basics you can take advantage of that don’t require any great technical wizardry. There are people who make a living as search engine optimization experts who companies will hire to make incremental improvements in the visibility of the sales pages on their websites. If you’re a big company, it can make sense to hire an SEO professional knowing that a 5% increase in search clicks to a sales page can result in thousands of dollars in additional revenue.
If you’re running the website of a small business or a Toastmasters club, my advice is to get the basics right, and you’ll tend to come out ahead.
Big businesses and particularly publishers are freaking out about how AI search, as in asking ChatGPT rather than asking Google, is changing search and click-through rates. There are all sorts of complexities about how optimizing for AI search is different from traditional SEO.
Again, in my experience, getting the SEO basics right tends to carry over into citations in ChatGPT and Gemini and others.
Example: Online Presenters
As evidence that I know what I’m talking about, here is how Online Presenters Toastmasters shows up if someone searches for “best online Toastmasters club.” We’re in the AI-powered summary at the top of the page and also included in the more personalized summary in the sidebar.
Funny enough, my home club Club Awesome is also showing up in the sidebar, even though it’s a hybrid club rather than an online club. But that’s probably because Google knows my location.
If I switch to an incognito browser window that gives fewer clues to my identity, Online Presenters still shows up at the top of the list.
If I enter a slightly different search query, Online Presenters is still on top but the other clubs featured change. This doesn’t mean we rank high for every possible search query where we would want to be mentioned, but we’re in many of them.
One other thing I can’t resist pointing out is that, of the other clubs that ranked in these search results, Buddies is another site hosted on my Toastmost service, while Netizens and In Camera Online both have independent WordPress websites. In Camera uses Easy-Speak for agenda management, so they have another website for that purpose, but the WordPress site is the one that gets found in Google.
Part of the reason WordPress sites do well is that something like 40% of all websites are based on WordPress, a popular choice for both businesses and bloggers. Google has had decades to analyze the structure of WordPress websites and indexes them very efficiently. WordPress and WordPress plugins also offer specific tools for boosting your search ranking.
Search Engine Optimization Basics in a Nutshell
Here are a few things that help with search engine optimization:
- Think carefully about the message you want to convey to the world about your club (or your business or your professional speaking profile). Include a clear value statement at the top of your home page and every other important page or blog post.
- Think about what people who need what you have to offer might enter into Google or ChatGPT as part of their search. What language would they use? Those are the keywords you want to optimize for.
- Include keywords in your site title and description (explained below) and in strategic locations like headings and the text of links.
- Rather than relying solely on your home page, create additional pages and blog posts on specific topics. Use these examples to optimize for different keywords than your home page. For example, a club focused on podcasting might use a blog post on choosing the right microphone as a way of showcasing expertise on that topic.
- Maintain a balance between optimizing for search engine bots and writing for people. The way you organize your page with subheads, numbered lists, and bullet points provides organizational cues to the bots, but it should also make your page more readable.
Here is an example of how the keywords online speaking, speaking online, online presentations, and others I wanted to include such as webinars and online training are included in the headline at the top of the Online Presenters home page and the first paragraph. I’m showing the HTML code behind the page because that’s what Google and ChatGPT use in their indexes.
Understanding how Google, Bing, and ChatGPT index your website
When people read a website, they may be impressed by fancy graphics and and wiz-bang animation effects. When googlebot, Google’s web indexing engine, and other search and AI bots visit your website, they are likely to be completely unimpressed. In most cases, they won’t “look” at your images at all — more about that later — meaning that you need to communicate your most important messages in well-organized, clearly written text.
Here is how the Online Presenters website looks as of late June 2026:
What googlebot sees is the code behind the page, the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) instructions for how the page should be organized and displayed. This includes a lot of technical information you normally don’t need to worry about because it’s taken care of by WordPress or whatever web publishing platform you use.
If I zoom in, and also simplify the code a bit, there are a few details that are important to how you show up in search results. Within the <head> section of an HTML document, there is a <title> tag within which you specify the title of the page or blog post.
Below that is a description meta tag containing a short description of the website. I’ll explain how those are set in WordPress farther down the page.
If I search for Online Presenters Toastmasters by name, the title and description will appear exactly as specified.
Note that if I use some other search term, Google may decide that some other text on my home page offers a better explanation of why it included the website in its search results. In other words, Google takes the description you’ve provided as a suggestion, rather than a directive that it is bound by. In the example below, Google shows the title I specified, but the text snippet is taken from a section of the home page that discusses how to become a member.
The code snippet I include above also included several <meta> tags that include property=”og:title”, property=”og:description”, and property=”og:image” that influence how a web page will be represented on social media. The “og” is a Facebook specification called Open Graph that some other social networks such as LinkedIn also support.
Using Yoast SEO to evaluate and improve pages and posts
The Yoast SEO plugin is one of the most popular plugins for boosting the search visibility of WordPress websites. The free version is active on all Toastmost sites and easy to add to any WordPress website. The additional features offered in the paid version are, in my opinion, not worth the cost of the upgrade for a Toastmasters club but worthy of consideration by a business or a district.
I mostly use Yoast SEO to set the title and descriptions of pages and blog posts and will usually also add an image for social media. Yoast also scores a page or post on how well it’s likely to rank for a focus keyword or key phrase.
The easiest way of accessing Yoast within the WordPress editor is by clicking on the stylized Y button in the upper right corner, which will open the Yoast sidebar. Between the Yoast button and the blue Publish or Save button is the icon for going back to the standard editor sidebar.
In the example below, I’m getting a green happy face for the SEO analysis of this blog post. If you’re instead getting a yellow or red frowny-face, you can look at Yoast’s explanation of what to improve.
To set the page title and description for search, go to the Search appearance section of the Yoast Sidebar. The Social media appearance lets you set the title, description, and social media image you want used to represent your page or post when the link is shared on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks.
Don’t rely exclusively on images to convey information
Images can be a great way to communicate with humans, but images alone are not a great way to communicate information you want search engines to rank you on.
Googlebot probably won’t “look” at your images, only at the HTML code that surrounds them. AI image processing is getting a lot better, but for the most part it’s not cost effective to expend computing power on that when the basic details of your website are (or ought to be) available as text that’s much easier for a search engine to parse, index, and understand. Search bots primarily look at the image captions, surrounding text, and any text description encoded in an image for clues to what an image means.
In other words, if all the best details about your club or a special event is embedded in an image, and not explained elsewhere on the page, you are unlikely to rank well for that information in search.
Providing alternative text for an image
One way of making the meaning of an image clear is to provide “alternative text” — a description that was originally introduced to the HTML standard for use by screen readers for the blind, but which search engines also look at.
In the simplified HTML snippet below, the words within quotation marks after alt= are the alternative text for the image.
In WordPress, you can set this attribute by selecting an image block and filling in the Alternative text field in the sidebar.
Don’t obsess. Get the basics right.
I don’t necessarily spend a lot of time futzing with Yoast, and I don’t always take the time to set the alt text for images, and yet I’ve done well at getting my websites ranked in google and cited by ChatGPT.
I think it’s worth obsessing over your home page and periodically reexamining whether anything you’ve added the content, particularly at the top of the page, helps convey your most important messages. What you remove can be as important as what you add.
If you’re hosting a special event, I would suggest promoting it not only on the home page but on the RSVPMaker page for the event (if you’re using RSVPMaker for event registration) and/or a blog post promoting the event. Put some effort into applying the SEO basics discussed here to that page or post.
Your goal should be to impress the search engines, but only as a means to an end. The end goal is still to make the best possible impression on the people who land on your website and attend your meetings.
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