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More Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques to Drive Traffic to Your Website
Part Three

In this final article, we wrap up the discussion of how to make your organization's website more attractive to Internet users by employing additional SEO techniques to drive traffic to your site:

1. Make your site easily navigable. If a bot or spider has trouble navigating through your site, so will human users, which will detrimentally affect your organization in the search engine standings. Be sure that every page can be located easily. Your homepage should be particularly easy to navigate. Ideally, the user should be able to get from any page of your site to any other page with just one click -- perhaps by using a dynamic, drop-down menu. (Be aware, though, that most dynamic menus will not work with search engines. The exception is drop-down menus that use embedded content in HTML.)
2. Don't have any "dead links". Every text link, image link, menu item, and button should actually work when a human user -- or crawler -- clicks on it. Here's a great tool to check for dead links: www.dead-links.com.
3. Create a site map. This will help spiders and users to navigate through your site.
4. Use appropriate titles on each page. On each page of your site, look at the line at the top left corner of your browser. You'll see a page title. The search engines see this as well. Hint: don't use a generic title like "Homepage". Instead, use a meaningful title (like the name of your nonprofit for your homepage title).
5. Use ALT text. These are the descriptions that are displayed if the images are not loaded properly. Ideally, all your images should have ALT text that is relevant to your content. Adding this text will also help your site be more accessible for disabled users.
6. Use a robots.txt file. This file tells the search engines which parts of your site to ignore.
7. Get listed in the Open Directory Project. It is the largest human-edited web directory.
8. Purchase your domain name (URL) for as long a period as possible. This lets the search engines know that you intend to be around for a long time. Luckily for nonprofits, .org domains are granted a higher status than .com domains. So if you don't have a .org domain, get one.
1. Don‘t have more than one or two hyphens in your domain name.
2. Keep your URL short – for the benefit of search engines and humans.
9. Your site should display with or without the "www".
10. Register your organization's website with search engines. Most search engines have free and paid ways for you to register with them (called search engine submission), increasing the speed and accuracy with which they'll recognize your site. For example, for $299 you can register with Yahoo's human-compiled directory for one year, helping the crawlers to find your site more easily and quickly.
11. Purchase ad words (also called Search Engine Marketing [SEM] or Pay Per Click [PPC]). For example, Google offers AdWords which you can purchase at x cents per click (minimum = 5-10 cents). You can even specify a total cap so you can control your costs. This way when a search engine visitor searches on those words, you will come up at or near the top, in the "sponsored links" section. Try initially setting a low budget with one or two AdWords. Measure the effectiveness of your AdWords -- in terms of increased website hits, donations, etc. If it proves to be effective, then purchase more AdWords. There are two parts to being successful with PPC: (1) having an ad that gets people to click through to your site and (2) having a website optimized for conversion. In other words, when the AdWords drive people to your site, you then want them to actually DO something -- donate, buy event tickets, etc. Otherwise your investment in AdWords may be wasted.
12. Apply for a Google Grant. Nonprofits can apply for free Google AdWords for at least three months.
13. Keep your site updated frequently. This means that you should add, change, and delete pages as well as content within pages. Users won't want to return to your site if it's static (i.e., if it is always exactly or almost exactly the same). Ditto for search engines. You want search engines to visit your site as often as possible, so keep updating your site, and they'll come back often to see what's new!

Google has a key measure of your site's ranking called PageRank™. This rates your homepage (or any page) from 0 to 10, with 10 being best. The only "10" you may ever encounter is Google itself! If your nonprofit's homepage is a 5 or above, you're doing pretty well. You can quickly determine your site's page rank here.

SEO is based on unknown and changing algorithms. So let's say that you do all the right things and that your website achieves a top ranking on Google for your choice of keywords this month. Next month you might be #60 -- not necessarily because you have done something wrong or because 59 sites jumped ahead of yours -- but possibly because Google changed its algorithm.

Nevertheless, the techniques discussed above are likely to help you achieve a higher search engine ranking and therefore more awareness and greater traffic to your site. Of course, you also should make sure to have a site that is worthy of lots of traffic. Hopefully, you'll have a site that is attractive, interactive (so people can support you, not just read about you), easily navigable, easy to maintain, and dynamic. A site like that, combined with the use of effective SEO techniques to drive a large volume of traffic to your site, can produce more donations, event tickets, volunteer signups, and other compelling results for your nonprofit.

Allan Pressel is the founder and CEO of CharityFinders. CharityFinders offers NonprofitSite123 -- an online tool that enables nonprofits to have world-class websites quickly, with no training or technical skills required. Previously, he co-founded i-Cube, which helped large corporations develop an IT/Internet strategy and implement it through software/web development and consulting services -- much like CharityFinders does for nonprofits

Tracks to Success is edited by Katy Mulcrone. Questions, comments, suggestions, and useful tips for other Tracks readers can be sent to her at katy@grantstation.com. If you would like to suggest a topic for a future Tracks to Success series, or if you are interested in writing a series for us, please email Katy, or call our toll-free number: 877.784.7268.