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Search engine optimization for nervous nonprofit novices

by Deborah Elizabeth Finn on Tue 19 Feb 2008 10:55 AM EST | Permanent Link | Cosmos

(Some colleagues of mine, fellow nonprofit technology assistance providers, recently asked me to draft a guide to search engine optimization strategy for their clients. They very kindly granted me permission to publish a version of it to my blog. I am eager to elicit feedback from SEO mavens, and would like to encourage readers to post comments here.)

Introduction

This article is designed to introduce nonprofit professionals to the basics of search engine optimization, which is also known as SEO. The tactics involved range from the simple to the sophisticated, but no special technical expertise is needed to formulate an SEO strategy.

As a nonprofit professional, you are already an expert in your organization's mission and programs. Moreover, you probably have already given thought to outreach, marketing, or public awareness for your nonprofit. Now you can bring your expertise and ideas to bear on your organization's web strategy. This is not rocket science.

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization is a general term for techniques that ensure that your web site is seen - not only by large numbers of random visitors, but the the visitors who are most likely to be your stakeholders.

Search engines such as Google and Yahoo each employ their own formulae for ranking web pages by popularity and quality. Your objective is to make sure that your organization's web site is highly ranked in any web search that your current (or potential) stakeholders are likely to try.

Some other important terms

If any of these terms are unfamiliar to you, we recommend that you consult Wikipedia for a detailed introduction:

· back link

· header tag

· indexing

· key word

· link exchange

· meta ta g

· page hit

· page rank

· search engine

· title tag

· web analytics

Why is SEO important?

While some visitors will be drawn to your web site because they read or hear about it from a trusted source, a substantial number will learn about it for the first time by going to their favorite search engine and entering the key words that occur to them. The art and science of SEO is ensuring that your web site ranks high in the key words that make intuitive sense to those potential visitors.

A visit to your web site is an opportunity to create or build upon relationships with communities you serve, with donors, with policy makers, with opinion leaders, with strategic allies, and with anyone who is looking for information, resources, or insights that your organization is uniquely qualified to offer.

Do-it-yourself SEO

Understanding how your stakeholders think about you

In thinking through your SEO strategy, it's important to consider that you already know what is on your web site and where to find it. The web visitors that you are striving to attract do not, and therefore they may come up with very different key word searches than the ones that seem intuitively obvious to you. It is very important to meet those visitors where they are, rather than to expect them to master your inside information before they begin their web searches.

It may be advisable to identify some individuals who fit the profiles of visitors that you would like to attract to your web site, and ask them to give you some random words that they associate with your organization. If you can't afford the time and money to organize a focus group, this can be an inexpensive way to capture this information.

Creating link exchanges

Many search engines rate web site on the basis of how many other high quality sites link to them. Perhaps the best two tactics for ensuring that other organizations link to you are 1) to ask those organizations directly, and 2) to provide links to their web sites on your pages. These work very well in tandem.

A carefully-selected and well-organized roster of recommended links can be a valuable feature on your home page. It is entirely appropriate to include links to leaders in your community and organizations that you respect, to call their attention to your collection of links, and to request that they add your web page(s) to their own lists of recommended links.

Directory listings

It's important to make sure that your organization is listed in data-rich web sites that aggregate information about agencies and services in your organization's sub-sector or geographic region. You may in fact be better qualified to target these directories than an SEO firm that is unfamiliar with your mission.

Examples:

· Idealist.Org

· Charity Navigator

· City, state, or federal governmental web sites

· Professional association web sites (e.g., human services)

· Commercial web directories (e.g., CitySearch)

· Neighborhood or community resource directories

· Volunteer match web sites

Some key words that every nonprofit organization should consider including as tags:

· action

· activism

· activist

· advocacy

· charitable

· charity

· community

· constituent

· donate now

· donor

· fundraising

· grantmaking

· human service

· impact

· mission

· mission-based

· ngo

· nongovernmental organization

· non-governmental organization

· nonprofit

· non-profit

· not-for-profit

· nptech

· organizing

· outcome

· outreach

· philanthropic

· philanthropy

· policy

· social

· social enterprise

· social responsibility

· social sector

· stakeholder

· third sector

· vision

· voluntary

· voluntary sector

· volunteer

Some categories of key words that every nonprofit organization should consider including:

· Geographic (e.g., names of neighborhood, municipality, county, state, country)

· Sub-sector (e.g., educational, social service, environment, arts, faith-based)

· Personal names (e.g., staff members, board members, well known friends of the organization)

· Populations served (e.g., elders, youth, refugees, people of color, diabetics)

· Buzz words (these may be current in popular culture or unique to your organization's mission)

Employing an SEO professional

Hiring an SEO expert is a challenge - if you don't know much about web strategy, it's difficult to distinguish the virtuosos from the charlatans.

However, you can learn a lot by asking around among other nonprofit organizations. Identify a few that have web sites that are highly ranked using key words that you have identified as important to your own stakeholders. Contact your counterparts in those organizations, and ask them whether they are satisfied with the SEO services they received, how much it cost, how much input from their own staff was needed in the process, whether the SEO firm needed to travel to meetings with the client, and how much follow-up is necessary to keep the optimization current. It's also important to have a sense of the other nonprofit's annual budget and staff size, as well as the size of their web site. Your colleagues in other organizations may be willing to tell you how many visitors their web sites are receiving on a daily or weekly basis; if so, it's worth it to compare that with the baseline of your own web site's traffic before optimization. If, after several conversations with colleagues in other organizations, you find yourself converging on two or three highly recommended firms, then it may be time to approach these SEO professionals for an initial conversation.

It's also important to be very clear at the outset about what you consider to be a quantifiable measure of success, and to hold your SEO experts to that as a goal. For example, you might say, "We have identified five key words that are crucial in our web strategy. Six months after the optimization, we expect to be ranked at least 10th on a Google search of any of these words, separately or together. At twelve months, we expect to be ranked at least 5th. In addition, at six months, we expect to see 1,000 unique hits a day on our home page; at twelve months, 2,000." (The actual numbers will of course vary with the unique characteristics of your organization and its mission.) By agreeing from the beginning about what you are trying to achieve, you can avoid misunderstandings; when the technical team proposes new tweaks, you can ask whether they will help you achieve the numbers that you have already stipulated in your definition of a positive outcome. You may even be able to tie the SEO firm's compensation to the level of achieved outcomes.

Ethical issues

There are many techniques for boosting a web site's page ranking; many web experts make a sharp distinction between legitimate ("white hat") and illegitimate ("black hat") strategies. "Black hat" strategies (also known as "gaming the system" or "spamdexing") can result in a web site being banned entirely from well-regarded search engines, and are ethically on par with deliberately misrepresenting verifiable information on your web site: it's wrong (and possibly even illegal), you are likely to be caught, and if you are caught the repercussions for your organization can be serious.

Next steps

In this introductory guide, we have sought to orient you to SEO with an emphasis on strategy and a minimum of technical instructions. Your next step should be to familiarize yourself with the items in the "Further reading" section, and to review the Wikipedia articles for any words terms that are unclear. It will also be helpful to ask someone who is well-versed in web development platforms to show you concrete examples of the items mentioned here.

You may also wish to gather a working group, to brainstorm about your SEO strategy and assist you in moving forward.

The following categories of staff members can be extremely useful:

· A secretary or administrative assistant with a superlative understanding of your nonprofit's internal processes and organizational culture.

· The staff member who is currently responsible for maintaining the web site, or for supervising those who maintain the web site.

· The director of programs, or another staff member with a superlative understanding of your organization's mission and programs.

· The senior manager who can approve a budget for SEO expenditures.

The following categories of external stakeholders can be extremely useful:

· A professional web developer or strategist who is friendly to your organization. (To prevent conflicts of interest, neither this individual nor his/her firm should be eligible to submit a bid for providing SEO services.)

· At least one member of the community you serve.

· At least one secondary school or college student.

The steps that follow from here will vary according to the unique needs of your organization, but we recommend that you all members of the working group review the Wild Apricot and Matt McGee articles listed below, and identify points made in each that should guide your process.