Top 10 tips #4 - Optimize your content

 

A non profit website has to make all search engines happy. Search engines like Google, Bing & Yahoo look at two things when they decide who to show on the first page. They look at the context and the authority. The context is what's happening on each page of your non profit website, and the authority is how important your website is on the internet.

Below are few tips to help you optimize your website:

• Define your keywords
  One of the mistake we commonly see if people trying to compete for highly competitive keywords instead of looking for opportunities. When you do an analysis, I would recommend you look for high traffic with lower competition and establish yourself there instead of trying with everybody else to compete for the top keywords. Look for the opportunity!
  
  
• There are plenty of free & low cost tools on the market to choose from:
• Google Keywords search tools (free)
  Great to identify your top 10 keywords.
  
  
• Google Analytics (free)
  Will analyze your traffic and tell you what people do when they land on your site. It will also tell you what keywords lead you to your site.
  
  
• ScribeSEO (starts at $17/month)
  This is one of the best value software and we highly recommend it. Install the plug-in directly into the text editor of your webpages, blogs, news articles, etc and click on the button to analyze the content. The analysis will tell you exactly what's missing to be 100% optimize, make the corrections and voila!! Our CMS is already configured to work with the plug-in and the set up takes about 3mn and is free to our clients.
  
  
• Website Grader (free)
  There are few tools on the market but the websitegrader.com is probably one of the easiest one to use. Simply enter your domain name, the url of a competing organization, your email address and it will send you a report of how your website is doing

Remember that optimizing your website is not very hard once you know what to do, but can be very time consuming. Large organizations will often time, have a dedicated staff to work on optimization only. I know of a person working for a large non profit organization where her job is to work exclusively on their blog and social networking presence on the internet. That's it. So considering hiring someone to help you with this may not be a bad idea unless you can spare 2-4 hours a week on optimizing your site.

Next blog, we'll cover Tip #5: Call to Action - Make it easy!!