Using SEO With Your Nonprofit Website - The Basics

Good SEO is essential for your nonprofit website’s success. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques increase your site’s chance of rising higher in organic search results (such as when people do a Google search for “Los Angeles Non Profit”) and attaining better site ranks in numerous directories. In a world where pay-per-click advertising devours millions in charitable advertising dollars each year, it makes sense to do everything you can to achieve great organic, unpaid results. Good SEO can help you do that.

There are countless books and sites devoted to improving your site’s SEO and SEO considerations. Without getting into too much detail, here are 5 techniques that will help you in your SEO mission.

Search Engine Spiders And Your Nonprofit Website
Search engine spiders “feed” on good SEO content. Many nonprofit websites owners think content only appears on the written page; i.e., the stuff you read directly on the site. While it’s partly true—it’s definitely not the whole story! Spiders also read Meta tags, coding, and even the page names you’ve given to your website’s files (look up in the browser bar title in your browser to see what I am talking about).

501c3 Website Page Names
One trick I recommend is using accurate page names to increase your SEO presence. For example, a page named “page5.html” means nothing to a human and search engines won’t care about it. On the other hand, consider the page name: “save-atlantas-trees.html.” This page name says basically what you can expect from it. It may not seem like much at first glance—but if you think of how search engines index this kind of material and use it to help catalog, sort, and show search results to potential clients and customers, you can see the benefit of optimizing your page names.

Charity Domain Name
Did you know your domain name is another secret SEO weapon? Let’s say your nonprofit is named “Benny Johnson Foundation” because Benny Johnson founded the organization. It’s fine as a general non-profit name, but as a domain name, it doesn’t give a clue about what the Benny Johnson Foundation does. This can leave potential donors guessing about the cause and hurt your organization's donations.

It’s vital to select a domain name that matches your organizations mission and location.

If you must have a non-keyword domain name as your primary, consider adding additional domain names which are rich in keywords such as these fake nonprofit examples helppheonixkids.com and chicagocatshelter.com . These domains can forward to your main domain, hooking customers in through their rich, applicable content. Forwarding a domain name is done on the server level – usually free of charge.

Charity META Tags
Lastly, Meta tags are an SEO staple. They live in the coded header of your web pages, literally offering search engines a platter of keywords and data to propagate. Meta tags are the easiest thing you can add to your nonprofit site. Be sure they use optimized keywords that advertise your charitable organization well.

SEO considerations are worth tackling, whatever your nonprofit size. Excellent SEO habits can improve your site’s worth and presence without costing a fortune in advertising!

Ian Anderson is co-founder of Intersection360. Ian specializes in hosted application architecture and GUI design. Intersection360 offers a wide range of non-branded web applications for the small business/non-profit markets. Some of Intersection360 products include: CharityHelper360 - secure forms processing for non-profits (Get a 7 DAY FREE TRIAL - limited time offer simply visit http://www.intersection360.com/ for details), WebEdit360 - an online website editor and more.

Learn more about how you can sell Intersection360 products as your own with the Intersection360 Partner Program at http://www.intersection360.com/partners/index.htm

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