SEO for the non-profit organization

If you are a non-profit organization, you may have a very low marketing budget and be highly dependent on your web site to reach your audience. This is a very distressing situation. Plus, you have a director who doesn’t even know what a PageRank is, but she heard that it is important. She keeps bringing it up at every staff meeting. Furthermore, you are reliant on volunteer energy. Your volunteers are very dedicated but so overtaxed that they are wandering around with one sock hanging from their ear, mumbling to themselves. You know that SEO is an investment, but you just can’t spare the cash. What are you going to do?

You have a couple of tricks up your sleeve.

Let’s take the Puppy Mills Example. You are an animal rights organization working to ban puppy mills. You have written very passionate copy about Puppy Mills and legislation that you are working to have passed in your state. But no one is coming to your web site.

First, I highly recommend blogging. Having a blog can personalize whatever message you are trying to convey. In this case, you could show pictures of animals that are suffering and animal that your organization has rescued from Puppy Mills. This helps create trust in the web users mind. Also, blogging is a good way to increase web traffic to your site. Since the blog pages are so easy to update, it is a good way to keep your content fresh.

The next advantage that you have is linking opportunities. People who believe in your cause are going to want to link to you. The may even consider one way links when in most cases, that request meets with a cold steely (virtual) silence. If you have done any work with government agencies or civic organizations, email them and ask for a link. Be professional and polite for sure, but try and appeal to their altruistic side. Also, find like minded web sites and ask for links. This will increase your page rank and your showing in the search engines. Neither technique cost much money, and can really help your visibility.

So now what?

You have done your homework and you have a great keyword list. The keywords represent a balance between bringing in traffic and being specific to your web site. You feel good about the words. Now what?

If you are working with a consultant, she will take the keywords and recalibrate your web site so that the content is key word rich. Also, she will she will make changes to the HTML so that your web site is W3C compliant. Optimization will also include making sure your Title tags, Header Tags, Alt Tags, Hyperlinks and possibly File names all make the most strategic use of your key words.

If you decide to optimize the web site yourself, you are going to want to an offline guide, i.e. a book. Personally, I recommend Search Engine Optimization, An Hour a Day. The writers have a very sane approach to SEO and their guidelines will serve you well.

You will also want to embark on a link campaign. Links are one of the factors that Google uses to decide your PageRank and ultimately where you end up on their natural or organic results. For reason that we will get into later, you will want text links back to your site to be keyword rich, so hold onto that list.