As online communication becomes more important to Extension professionals, understanding how promotional strategies affect the number of people accessing online content also becomes more important. We tracked website visits resulting from four different promotional efforts to understand relative effectiveness of these efforts. Each effort was…

Extension educators, staff, and specialists need to use surveys and other measurement instruments to assess their programming and conduct other research. Challenges in locating tests and measurement tools, however, include lack of time and lack of familiarity with techniques that can be used to find them. This article discusses library resources…

Effective Internet search skills are essential with the continually increasing amount of information available on the Web. Extension personnel are required to find information to answer client questions and to conduct research on programs. Unfortunately, many lack the skills necessary to effectively navigate the Internet and locate needed…

For Extension's unbiased, research-based content to be found by people searching the Internet, it needs to be organized in a way conducive to the ranking criteria of a search engine. With proper web design and search engine optimization techniques, Extension's content can be found, recognized, and properly indexed by search engines and…

In July 2009 four faculty members from four different institutions created a blog to educate consumers and professionals about plant-related issues. Online resources were used to measure the number of times that the blog was viewed and its impacts. The blog averages about 200 views a day, and 80% of those responding to a survey could name specific…

The first Extension-authored link in Google Search (2011a) for "how to garden" was ranked an abysmal 82nd. Worse, Internet users selected the top-ranked site significantly more often than they selected the second-ranked one, and they rarely selected any site ranked lower than #10 (Granka, Joachims, & Gay, 2004). An…