What exactly are WordPress tags and categories? What purpose should they serve for the reader? Should they each just be one word? How do tags and categories relate to each other? And what does all this mean for SEO?

What’s the Difference Between WordPress Tags And Categories?

Categories are like the aisles in a grocery store and tags are like the ingredients in the various different foods. Chinese chili sauce is only located in the ethnic foods aisles, but garlic (an ingredient) is found in the chips aisle, the frozen dinners aisle, and the vegetable aisle.

Tags (ingredients) link together all of your posts (food items) across your categories (aisles).

According to WordPress, tags “make it easier for people to find your content. Tags are similar to, but more specific than, categories.”

Categories and tags also influence how your blog posts rank in search engines.

How to Create Effective WordPress Tags

Examples of useful tags include “no-kill dog shelter”, “adoptable dogs”, and“Australian Cattle Hounds”. Examples of bad tags include “dog“, “shelter”, and“transportation”. The idea is to write tags that are highly specific, and can stand on their own.

This way, your readers can find the content they’re looking for much more quickly. Plus, someone looking to adopt an Australian Cattle Hound will never type “dog”into a search engine.

There are at least three purposes that tags serve:

1. Put your readers before anything else. Ask yourself this: If someone clicked on your tag, will the tag archive be what they’re looking for?
2. Use existing tags first. To avoid redundant tags, use an existing tag before creating a new one. WordPress makes this easy with an auto-complete feature and a tag-cloud – both display tags you’re already written.
3. Make a regular habit of deleting tags that are redundant or too general. Search by topic in your tags panel and weed everything out until you have a few highly specific tags for that topic.

Three useful WordPress plugins for tags

If you do use WordPress, there are several plugins that can create powerful experiences for readers using tags. Configurable Tag Cloud and Opacity Tags are my personal favorites. If you need to delete unused tags, check out theMass Delete Unused Tags plugin.

How to Create Effective WordPress Categories

A dog shelter blog I recently visited included the following categories in the sidebar:“Hairy”, “Declawed”, “Thoughts”. The problem with these categories – and it’s a very common problem – is that they don’t help the reader.

There are at least three purposes that categories serve:

1. Categories help you communicate to readers what your blog is about. And if people can’t figure this out, they will quickly leave. Categories can be used to create a hierarchal navigation menu in your header or sidebar which quickly communicates the topics your blog covers.
2. Categories help you control where people click on your site. Don’t forget that the purpose of your website is to direct visitors down specific paths of action. You decide which categories to include in your navigation. You decide which categories to display on specific sidebars within your site.
3. Categories help you get found on Google. Google uses your categories to help index your website content. Google also looks at the topical relationship of all your categories as well, so the dog shelter mentioned about might move their “Thoughts” content to another blog.

Four things you can do now to improve your categories:

1. Make them clear. Edit your categories so that they are broad enough to cover the larger topics you blog about, but specific enough so that people can know what they’re going to get when they click on the category page.
2. Consolidate categories. Through the process of renaming your categories, you will no doubt find useless categories. Remove the posts from these categories put them somewhere else and delete these useless categories.
3. Clean your slugs. Slugs are the simple URL structure associated with the category. Remove words like “a” and “the. This will help improve the URL structure for search engines. There are also plugins to help clean up your slugs.
4. Start another blog. If you find yourself writing blog posts about topics unrelated to your website, consider starting a personal blog. Again, your readers and Google look for the prevailing themes of your blog when deciding to subscribe or rank. If there’s not cohesive theme, you’re in trouble.

Optimizing categories and tags on your site is a lot of work, but the enhanced search rankings and enhanced reader experience are well worth the toil.

How are you using categories and tags?

Check out these related articles:

• The Ultimate Facebook Ad Guide For Fundraising Events
• The Ultimate Last-Minute #GivingTuesday Campaign Checklist
• Pinterest Analytics Explained – A Video Guide for Beginners

The post WordPress Tags And Categories – The Ultimate Guide For Nonprofits appeared first on Socialbrite.

Search basics every organization needs to know

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, educators, journalists.

Guest post by Teddy Hunt

If you’re just starting to look into search engine optimization, or SEO, it’s important to get a handle on how it works so that you use it to benefit your organization. Using SEO properly will eventually pays big dividends as it boosts your website’s visibility, thereby creating more opportunity to convert prospects into supporters or customers.

Let’s run down a few simple things to keep in mind when you’re first getting started.

What is SEO?

1The first step to effectively implementing an SEO strategy is to understand what it is. Search engine optimization affects how your website shows up in the unpaid, or organic, search results returned by Google and other search engines. Most users click on the first few results of a search, and even fewer make it past the first page. So when you don’t break into the top, you’re losing opportunity for support.

Researching keywords

2Although their value has dipped a bit in the latest iterations of Google’s algorithm, learning how to use keywords wisely is still a key part of SEO. Do your research to get the best results! Tools like Google Analytics will help you get started — look at Content > Site Content > Content Drilldown >Tags (yes, those are keywords), for starters. Figure out some keywords that match up with your cause, service, product or offering — both the ones that are working and the ones you’re not ranking for then try out Google’s new Keyword Planner, which has taken the place of the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, to see which of keywords people search for most often.

Creating titles and descriptions

3Meta descriptions and page titles are the first things that any visitor will come across when they’re searching for your site — that’s what they see on the search engine results page. As a result, you’ll need to optimize these so that they also work with your keywords. Make sure your page titles and meta descriptions include those top keywords you determined. You’ll need to make sure that they’re written correctly as well so that they display well in search engines. However, first and foremost, they should be designed with your users in mind.

Understanding keyword ratio

4It’s not enough to use your keywords. You need to exercise caution when using them. In fact, if you use them too often, you’re actually hurting yourself. You shouldn’t have a keyword density of more than 3% when you’re creating your text. If you do, search engines could think you’re spamming, and this will hurt your results. While having a good density of keywords isn’t as important as it has been in the past — inbound links have become more important — it’s still a valuable part of SEO.

Using internal links

5Learning how to work internal linking is another important part of a successful SEO strategy, because it helps search engines find the deeper parts of the site. You’ll want to know that everything links up correctly. Adjust how you structure your internal linking system so that the keywords you have in the content on your site link to other pages. This way, you’ll improve your results while creating a seamless experience for your users once they land on your website.

Optimizing URLs

6Of course, you can’t just keep your keywords in your text. Keywords are important throughout your website, including in your page URLs. You’ll want to make sure that your page URLs contain those keywords you’re targeting. This way, search engines will rank your site based on this, too. And anything that boosts your ranking when it comes to search engines is a big help.

Optimizing HTML

7Keywords go far beyond the simple text you’re using as the content in your website. Along with your URLs, you should optimize your HTML. To do so, check that your image tags, title tags and H1 tags match the keywords you’re looking to target. Keeping these things in line with your targeted keywords goes a long way when it comes to SEO.

Using analytics to your benefit

8When you’ve selected your keywords, written your content and followed all the steps for SEO, you’ll want to track your results to make sure you stay on target. Google Analytics will come in handy here as well. You’ll have access to the data that shows how you’re performing, and with that knowledge, the power to tweak things to get even better results. Check out these sections in particular: Content Drilldown, In-Page Analytics, Speed Suggestions and more.

Writing for mobile sites

9With so many people relying on their mobile devices for Web browsing, it’s essential that you don’t ignore mobile sites when designing an SEO strategy. Eighty-one percent of Internet users use their phones to browse. Since search engines rank your site higher if you have a mobile version of the website as well, you don’t want to ignore users on 4G LTE phones on T-Mobile or other mobile phones.

Fresh content is key

10It doesn’t matter if you have an intricately crafted SEO strategy that uses the best keywords. You won’t keep readers with stale content. By continually updating your content and creating new content — always based on these SEO tips — you’ll keep search engines and customers alike happy. Do this by updating various sections of your site and keeping an updated blog.

Whether you’re launching your website or fine-tuning it to make sure more people find it, there are certain things to keep in mind when formulating an SEO strategy. Learning how SEO works goes a long way in making sure that potential funders and donors get themselves to your site.

Related

• 5 powerful ways to improve your website’s SEO (Socialbrite)

• 5 Google Analytics stats you should be tracking (Socialbrite)

•15 ways to optimize your website’s landing pages (Socialbrite)

• Socialmedia.biz posts on SEO & search techniques

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Infographics & data visualization turn data into stories

Guest post by Julia Reich
Principal & Creative Director, Julia Reich Design

Most organizations have important data to present to their clients, members, boards of directors and other constituencies. Yet who has time to read or understand the reports, charts and diagrams created by your overworked staff?

Infographics are a communication trend that’s all about displaying data in an attractive, easily digestible format. With their unique combination of images and words, infographics are a powerful storytelling tool. It’s a way to take all that data you’ve collected about the great things your organization does and use it for social good purposes – to illustrate timelines, histories, relationships, the impact of a program and much more.

Removing a barrier to understanding

Ceci Dadisman, the director of marketing and public relations at Palm Beach Opera in West Palm Beach, Fla., used an infographic to promote her group’s 50th Anniversary Season. She says, “Opera, ballet and symphony are such complicated art forms. We are always trying to explain it simply in a nonthreatening way. Infographics  are a good way to explain what opera is with some facts anyone could understand.”

Jeff Ferzoco should know. As the creative and technology director at Regional Plan Association in New York – an 85-year-old advocacy group focused on urban research and planning in the tri-state area – it’s his team’s job to sift through mountains of data and figure out the best way to arm policy-makers and citizens with the knowledge they need to move the conversation forward about a particular project.

“Busy people don’t want to spend too much time to unravel complicated information, so if it’s explained at a level that’s instantly understandable and emotionally satisfying, you’ll have a lot more success getting your message across. It removes a barrier to understanding,” he says.

Infographics for reports, newsletters, videos, blog posts

Nonprofits are using infographics in a multitude of ways, such as in reports, newsletters, with a blog post, or in a video.

The marketing team at Open Arms, based in Minneapolis – an organization that  cooks and delivers free meals for individuals too ill to provide for their own nutritional needs – created several infographics last year for their 2010 annual report.

Kelly McManus is creative director at Open Arms and Susan Pagani is the Communications Director. They say that scattering the report with several infographics was a strategic decision they made together. “We wanted it to be more accessible to everyone – not just those who read the entire report cover to cover. Before, it was onerous to read. This has brought a level of fun to it.”

Kelly and Susan state they made the annual report more engaging by mixing up the serious statistics that are required to be reported, with more quirky facts – such as how many cookies were baked. This warm, welcoming approach reinforces their brand as well.

How to get started when creating an infographic

To begin an infographic project, it’s important to determine at the outset what your overall goals are, who your audiences are and what message you want to convey. Find the story you want to tell with graphics, and mine your data to locate the facts that support that idea. You will also need to provide text that accompanies the graphics, such as headlines and conclusions.

McManus supports this idea. “Infographics are a team effort. We got started by creating an outline on what messages we wanted to convey and those certain things you have to report on as an NPO, and then there are things we bring in to warm it up in a way our audience would find inspiring. We worked together with different departments to obtain the statistics we needed. Finally, we sketched it out and started creating designs.”

Infographics as a way to boost your site’s SEO

The more compelling the information in your infographic, the more people are likely to share it, like it, mention it – so more traffic gets driven to that page, thereby boosting your page rankings.

By promoting your piece thoughtfully, you can increase the likelihood of this happening:

• Optimize with keywords: “Bots” can’t read the text in your graphic (typically a jpeg or png file), but any image inserted on a site can be optimized by adding a title, 3-5 sentence introduction, and “alt text” (that’s text you see in lieu of an image on a site if the image loads slowly) into the HTML code. Use the word “Infographic” in the title. The actual file name should be keyword-rich too (rather than some file naming convention you may use internally). Tip: Google *can* read content in a PDF, so consider posting an alternative file your audience can download.
• Incoming traffic: Since they are easily shared via email and social networks, infographics drive people back to your site to see the graphic in context to possibly learn more, or get a better, larger view of it. Make it easy for users to share the piece by adding the following buttons: Twitter, Facebook Like, Google +1 and StumbleUpon.
• Time spent: An informative piece on a topic with wide appeal makes a Web page more interesting, so visitors are more apt to spend time on that page – and that’s a good thing, according to Google’s ever-shifting page-ranking algorithm.

Measuring efficacy is tricky business

The nonprofit marketeers and designers I talked with agree that measuring an infographic’s success is difficult. Instead, Dadisman has a different set of expectations: “We knew we weren’t going to get direct ticket sales from it; it’s more of a mission to further our presence in the community and about opera  in general.” She admits, “It’s hard to measure ROI. The evidence is anecedotal. It’s more of a long-term effort to build brand awareness. We can watch the infographic make its way around the internet with very little effort after the initial posting, so we know people are sharing it and spreading the word.”

At Open Arms, McManus and Pagani agree. “Donations went up last year but we can’t pin it directly to our infographic efforts. We hear a lot of comments – people from other organizations are using the infographics we created to show their own nonprofit how to convey information for donors and volunteers in a way that hasn’t been done before.”

The value of data visualization

The ubiquity of mobile devices means more and more data streams are flowing all around us, with a need for that information to be processed, delivered and understood. And with people becoming more design-savvy over time, there’s a demand for visual clarity and accessibility. Infographics are a tool that can use data in an attractive and engaging way to provide value to your organization.

Dadisman appreciates the impact infographics have had on her marketing efforts and plans to create more in the future. “It is the vernacular right now. Most people are visual learners. The arts are perfect for this form of communication.”

Especially for nonprofits, McManus and Pagani concur that “Infographics make it possible to tell a complex story in a few words that people can grasp right away. They’re great for nonprofits to tell a  story that will resonate with your audience. Telling people their dimes are being put to good worth – that is the ultimate value.”

The post Infographics: Not your grandmother’s pie chart appeared first on Socialbrite.

A quick, helpful guide for nonprofits using WordPress

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, marketers, WordPress users.

One of the most common questions about writing an effective blog post is the proper use of categories and tags.

What exactly are categories and tags? What purpose should they serve for the reader? Should they each just be one word? How do tags and categories relate to each other? And what does all this mean for optimizing your site for search (SEO)?

Categories vs. tags

Categories are like the aisles in a grocery store and tags are like the ingredients in the various different foods. Chinese chili sauce is located only in the ethnic foods aisles, but garlic (an ingredient) is found in the chips aisle, the frozen dinners aisle, and the vegetable aisle.

Tags (ingredients) link together all of your posts (food items) across your categories (aisles).

According to WordPress, tags “make it easier for people to find your content. Tags are similar to, but more specific than, categories.”

Categories and tags also influence how your blog posts rank in search engines.

How to create effective WordPress tags

Examples of useful tags include “no-kill dog shelter,” “adoptable dogs” and “Australian cattle hounds.” Examples of bad tags include “dog,” “shelter” and “transportation.” The idea is to write tags that are highly specific and can stand on their own.

This way, your readers can find the content they’re looking for much more quickly. Plus, someone looking to adopt an Australian cattle hound will never type “dog” into a search engine.

There are at least three purposes that tags serve:

1. Put your readers before anything else. Ask yourself this: If someone clicked on your tag, will the tag archive be what they’re looking for?
2. Use existing tags first. To avoid redundant tags, use an existing tag before creating a new one. WordPress makes this easy with an auto-complete feature and a tag-cloud; both display tags you’re already written.
3. Make a regular habit of deleting tags that are redundant or too general. Search by topic in your tags panel and weed everything out until you have a few highly specific tags for that topic.

Three useful WordPress plug-ins for tags

If you do use WordPress, there are several plug-ins that can create powerful experiences for readers using tags. Configurable Tag Cloud and Opacity Tags are my personal favorites. If you need to delete unused tags, check out the Mass Delete Unused Tags plug-in.

How to create effective WordPress categories

A dog shelter blog I recently visited included the following categories in the sidebar: “Hairy,”,“Declawed,” “Thoughts.” The problem with these categories – and it’s a very common problem – is that they don’t help the reader.

There are at least three purposes that categories serve:

1. Categories help you communicate to readers what your blog is about. And if people can’t figure this out, they will quickly leave. Categories can be used to create a hierarchal navigation menu in your header or sidebar that quickly communicates the topics your blog covers.
2. Categories help you control where people click on your site. Don’t forget that the purpose of your website is to direct visitors down specific paths of action. You decide which categories to include in your navigation. You decide which categories to display on specific sidebars within your site.
3. Categories help you get found on Google. Google uses your categories to help index your website content. Google also looks at the topical relationship of all your categories as well, so the dog shelter mentioned about might move their “Thoughts” content to another blog.

Four things you can do now to improve your categories

1. Make them clear. Edit your categories so that they are broad enough to cover the larger topics you blog about, but specific enough so that people can know what they’re going to get when they click on the category page.
2. Consolidate categories. Through the process of renaming your categories, you will no doubt find useless categories. Remove the posts from these categories, put them somewhere else and delete these useless categories.
3. Clean your slugs. Slugs are the simple URL structure associated with the category. Remove words like “a” and “the. This will help improve the URL structure for search engines. There are also plug-ins to help clean up your slugs.
4. Start another blog. If you find yourself writing blog posts about topics unrelated to your website, consider starting a different blog, perhaps one just for your personal take on things. Again, your readers and Google look for the prevailing themes of your blog when deciding to subscribe or rank. If there’s not a cohesive theme, you’re in trouble.

Optimizing categories and tags on your site is a lot of work, but the enhanced search rankings and enhanced reader experience are well worth the toil.

How are you using categories and tags?

The post Understand WordPress tags and categories appeared first on Socialbrite.

Connect your organization through Facebook Graph Search

Target audience: Nonprofits, NGOs, cause organizations, social enterprises, businesses, Web publishers, bloggers, social media managers, anyone with a Facebook Page.

Facebook’s new Graph Search is very different from Google search. With Graph Search, you combine keyword searches with friends who’ve shared content on Facebook related to that search.

For example, here’s a search of friends who like The Ellie Fund and live in Boston:

Graph Search also allows people to discover your organization through different keyword / network search combinations:

Facebook Page SEO isn’t new

Google has been indexing Facebook Pages for quite some time now, so Facebook Page SEO (search engine optimization) isn’t anything new.

Both Google’s and Facebook’s search algorithms consider your page name, category, vanity URL and keywords within your About tab.

What is new is the combination of keyword, category and connection (as shown in the examples above) – and the way Graph Search suggestions influence how searches are conducted.

Here are eight steps to optimizing your Facebook Page for both Google and Facebook’s Graph search:

Tweak your page category

1Make sure you’ve selected the best possible category for your page. You can edit your category by going into your Basic Information admin panel, as shown above.

Tweak your page sub-categories

2If you have a Facebook Place (local Place or Business), you can add up to three sub-categories. These can be added / updated within your Basic Information admin panel (as shown above).

Complete your address

3Graph search will allow users to search for local nonprofits their friends like, so make sure your address is complete and current.

Complete your About section

4The information you share in your About section will help people find your page in search. Particularly if you put keywords at the beginning of specific fields.

Do not start off with, “We are a 501(c)3 organization…” People don’t search for 501(c)3 when they’re looking for services and resources for breast cancer patients.

Tag your photos

5Photos are a primary content type displayed in Graph Search results. Make sure you tag each photo with your page name and any location associated with the photo.

Pay attention to photo descriptions

6Devote a few seconds to filling in photo descriptions. For instance, guess which keywords are in the description of each photo this search result?

Create a username

7If you haven’t done so already, create a custom URL (username) for your page that includes the name of your organization. For example, http://www.facebook.com/pages/Ashoka/66279444793 should be shortened to http://www.facebook.com/Ashoka. This will improve your SEO on both Facebook and Google.

Continue creating killer content

8Remember, like Google, Facebook wants to display the best results at the top of a search. And parsing out great content on Facebook has always been done by looking at how much people have talked about that specific photo, video or text update.

Questions? Tips? Share them in the comments section below!

The post 8 steps to prepare your Facebook page for Graph Search appeared first on Socialbrite.

How Twylah can help you get more juice out of your tweets

Twylah is a way to organize your tweets on a single webpage that’s SEO-friendly and search engine optimized, essentially giving your tweets greater exposure and a significantly longer life.

With Twylah, your tweets are organized by the topics you tweet about the most, and showcased on a single page where people can easily scan for content they find interesting.

Do you have a Twylah page? How do you like it?

The post How to get your tweets to have staying power appeared first on Socialbrite.

Why optimizing your website for search is key

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, educators, Web publishers.

There are many ways to drive traffic to your website, including email marketing, social media and traditional PR. While these approaches are useful and effective, they all share one critical weakness:

You’re reaching people who weren’t looking for you.

Why SEO is an absolute must for your nonprofit

Optimizing your website for search allows you to reach people precisely when they are looking for you!  This means that they’re probably more likely to donate, volunteer, or join an email list. With this in mind, following are five ways to increase your website’s search engine optimization (SEO).

Understand how your supporters search for your cause

1Enter the keywords you’ve decided on in Google, and notice what Google suggests as you type (as shown below).  Write your title with these words – in the same order they appear.

When people use Google Instant and select what Google suggests, your website will show up in those results. You can also do more research with the Google External Keyword Tool.

Also study how your current supporters talk about your cause at events, on Facebook and on Twitter. Notice the lack of jargon used in your board meeting?

Understand how browsers see your website

2Once you understand how people are searching for your cause, you need to understand how search engines display your website in those search results. Check your website with SEO-browser.com and get all sorts of useful information about how your site is indexed (shown below).

Put your keywords toward the beginning of your page titles

3Put the keyword you wish to rank for toward the beginning of your title. In doing this, you will optimize how you’re found via Google Instant, and when you do show up, users will more easily notice your title as they scan down the results.

Keep your titles short

4You don’t want your title to appear incomplete, and you certainly don’t want your keywords cut off by search engines! Keep your title under 60 characters. Most search engines will only recognize up to 60 characters and truncate the rest, like the example below.

Create killer content

5Always remember to put your readers first. When you do this, you will naturally increase the number of inbound links from other websites, along with the number of shares on Facebook and Google Plus. Search engines use this information to assess how valuable a piece of content is. When you put readers first, you’ll also optimize your articles with keywords in a way that’s natural – not forced.

In the next installment of this series we’ll talk about making your website more social. If you haven’t yet, you can subscribe to the series here.

The post 5 powerful ways to improve your website’s SEO appeared first on Socialbrite.

Tips for planning, creating & improving your nonprofit’s website

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, educators, Web publishers, bloggers.

Last week in this ongoing series you learned five ways to make your website content more remarkable. In this post, we’ll drill down into your website’s landing pages to find ways to improve one of your organization’s most important ways of reaching the public.

What’s a landing page and why should you care?

A landing page is a page on your website where you want visitors to complete a specific transaction, such as donating money or joining an email list. These are some of the most important pages on your site. As author and social marketer Seth Godin put it: “Landing pages are the new direct marketing, and everyone with a website is a direct marketer.” 

As you can imagine, this is always harder than it sounds. Bad design, uninspiring text and slow load times are just a few challenges. 

Following are 15 specific things you can do now to improve the performance of your landing pages.

Planning your landing pages

1What’s your goal? Pick one, and only one. This is often the most difficult part of an online strategy, so take some time to get it right.

2Who’s your audience? It’s tempting to think that your landing page needs to engage all of your audiences, but if you try and create messages that speak to everyone, all you’ll end up doing is inspiring no one.

3What’s your story? Pick one, and make sure it hooks into people’s emotions.

Creating your landing pages

4Maintain the same branding on all landing pages. There should be uniformity on your Facebook custom tab and avatar, in your email newsletter template, and in your direct mail pieces. A consistent visual experience is the lubricant for smooth transactions and higher conversions.

5Use white space to direct the eye. White space at the margins will tend to direct your visitor to the center of the page.

6Use bullet points and numbered items. Bullet points are extremely humble little creatures but they subconsciously convey two powerful messages: “You will be getting several things here,” and “These things are very specific.”

7Use big buttons. As Amnesty International found, bigger donation buttons help convert more donors.

8Focus attention with a compelling and concise headline that states the outcome. Malaria No More is a great example of where this is implemented well.

9Focus attention with a compelling image. One technique that works particularly well: a photo of an individual looking directly at the user.

10Spend the money on licensing a professionally shot photograph. If you won’t be hiring a local photographer, you can use a stock photo agency such as Fotolia, BigStockPhoto, iStockphoto, Shutterstock or Getty Images.

11Use fewer words. Focus only on story and the call to action. A good exercise in condensing text is to take your existing copy and cut it in half. Chances are good that you’ll end up with a much more effective landing page.

12Keep the important stuff above the fold (the area of browser that’s visible without scrolling down).

Improving functions within landing pages

13Ditch the sidebars. Unless the information in the sidebar contributes to the landing page, get rid of them!

14Reduce page load times. People start to drop off if your page takes longer that 2 seconds to load. Use Google Page Speed for suggestions on making your page faster.

15Get more out of your thank you page. Your cause is top of mind for people when they donate or sign a petition. Use that moment to get them to take another action (e.g., share, join an email list or SMS list).

Five ways to improve your website’s SEO

The next installment of this series will focus on improving your website’s ability to rank on page one of Google. If you haven’t yet, you can subscribe to the series here.

The post 15 ways to optimize your website’s landing pages appeared first on Socialbrite.

Help your supporters find their way to your organization’s key pages in the Web forest

Guest post by Matt Metten

The day or week after a website launch, someone will inevitably notice that they can’t find the site on Google, Yahoo! or Bing. This might seem funny or inevitable, given that there are thousands of websites launched each day, but it also shows a underestimation of what is required to be found online.

However, this isn’t as funny when your organization’s site has been online for a while and is still not being found. You know your website was indexed by the search engines, but it is listed on page 10 in Google – and no one will ever see it! What do you do?

There is a multibillion-dollar industry around the science of search engine optimization, so it’s not surprising that lots of Web managers are confused. What the search engines are looking for changes constantly, so unless you are committed to staying up with it all, getting ranked is going to take some help.

There is hope!

10 things to start improving your rankings right now

1. Get an analytics tool. Ensure you have some sort of analytics tool installed on every page so you can see how people are getting to your site, what they’re looking at and spending the most and least time with, where they leave your site from the most, what keywords they are typing in to find you, what sites are referring them to you and a whole host of other data. I recommend Google Analytics — it’s free and quite comprehensive.
 
2. Ensure your pages load quickly. If there is something that takes forever to load on your page (a Flash movie or some JavaScript function, for instance), your rankings will drop. Try out your site on multiple browsers, on multiple operating systems, in as many different ways as possible and keep tweaking your pages until they are running quickly and efficiently. Another great free tool is Google’s Webmaster tool. Load that up and let it help diagnose any problem areas!
 
3. Validate your pages. Make sure they are all clear of errors, and are “correct” according to the industry standards that are out there. There are plenty of resources online to help with the process. Start with the W3C Markup Validation Service — you may need your tech staff or a contractor to help with this. If your site is not browser compatible, for instance, your SERP (Search Engine Results Page) rating will drop. Take the time to make sure everything in your control is as dialed in as possible.
 
4. Make sure each page has a good page title. A strong page title will tell the search engines what content users can find there. The page title can be different from the actual title or headline on the page (talk to your Web developer), but the page title is critical to your SEO success. Most content management systems have a place to define your page title.
 
5. Define your keywords. Clearly define the keywords that you are trying to rank for and then ensure that as much as possible you include those keywords in each post. This can also hurt your chances if you over-use your keywords, but just make sure that as much as possible your keywords are included within the body of your content. Note: these keywords should also dominate your page titles and section headers.
 
6. Have images in your posts and articles work for you! Make sure you include an “alt” tag in each image that is rich in your desired keywords as well. Note: make sure your images are set to 72 dpi and set exactly to the size you want them. The quicker your images load, the better for your optimization.
 
7. Link to other articles and posts you’ve written. Use your site to promote your site! When you are writing something and reference a concept you’ve already written about or an event you are promoting, link to it.
 
8. Link correctly! When you are linking (either internally or externally) ensure your link contains keywords that you value. For instance, instead of just using “Click here,” make sure your link contains relevant keywords. Note: much like the “alt” tag in images, use the “title” tag in links for better SEO muscle.
 
9. Post often. No matter how big your organization is, if the search engines cannot find new content when they come to spider through, your ranking will drop. Content is and will be king for a while.
 
10. Work to get higher ranking websites to link to you. When they do link to you, make sure they link to a specific page on your site (one that has relevant content), and make sure they use good keywords in their links to you. One good way to achieve this is by having guest posts by well-known authors. Note: “reciprocal linking” is not as much a factor these days as it has been so abused in the past. What matters with linking is having reputable websites that reference your site for greater validation.

Are there any other key factors you think should be considered? Please chime in!

The post How to improve your nonprofit’s ranking on Google appeared first on Socialbrite.

Guest post by Dennis Yu
CEO, BlitzLocal

Most experts will tell you not to play this risky game — your long-term strategy is to write lots of good content. If it’s good for humans, it’s good for robots. And much of what SEOs charge for is good old-fashioned webmastering.

So ask yourself these questions:

1Is your code clean? Run it through validator.w3.org and see. Search engines are finicky and fragile. Cut and paste whole content blocks and paste them into the search box to see if they’re being indexed.

2Does your site load fast? Check average load times with free external monitoring services, like host-tracker.com and spyfu.com. Could your images be reduced in size? Optimize your code to run faster and cache where possible. You want pages to load in under one second for an average connection.

3Are you using dynamic pages? Do your urls have question marks or equal signs in them ( www.mysite.org/?sessionid=123&contentid=3456 , etc…)? You can typically have one or two variables in the url, but it’s best to have static pages where you can. Descriptive urls are better for the user and can result in portions of your url being bolded (a good thing) when they match terms in the user’s search. CRM (Constituent Relationship Management) and CMS (Content Management System) vendors such as GetActive/Convio and Joomla have issues with dynamic urls but are working to make their packages SEO-friendly.

4Do you have a Flash landing page? Or perhaps Flash navigation? Search engines cannot see beyond flash, as they look only at text. Do it in CSS. Use the Lynx browser or do a “view source” to get an idea of what search engines see. Don’t put up brick walls to search engines.

5Do you have multiple versions of your homepage? For example, http://www.mysite.org and http://mysite.org), which is also known as the “canonical” issue. To prevent diluting your rank, choose one version and permanently redirect all others to that one. See Matt Cutts’ advice.

6Do you have lots of great content? One of our clients, a nonprofit with a $200 million annual operating budget, wanted to rank highly on a particular term, which was nowhere to be found on their site or sitemap. Our advice: create a page a day of unique content on that topic and over time you’ll be there in the rankings. Simple, but rarely followed. Don’t copy content from elsewhere in any significant way, as that can result in a dupe penalty or even get you banned.

7Do your page titles and tags match your content? For all the talk about how managing meta tags can magically boost rankings, the reality is that if it’s something search engines can see, but humans can’t, it will receive less weighting. It can be gamed. Yet there is still value in having page titles and meta descriptions that reflect terms that are important to you. Just don’t stuff the title with every possible keyword you can imagine. Write your meta descriptions just as you would pay-per-click ad copy — be specific and use verbs, as that is what will show under natural search results. Links between pages should also have your key search phrases — don’t use “click here” in your anchor text.

8Are you doing web analytics? Google Analytics is free and so is awstats. These programs can tell you where users are coming from, what they’re doing on the site, what keywords they came in through, and what’s driving an email signup or donation. Vendors like Lyris’s ClickTracks.com sell a more advanced product that will monitor your SEO rankings, perform A/B split tests, or even manage search campaigns, among other things. Google has other free tools like Website Optimizer, which help you perform landing page testing with ease. Many of these tools are free and easy to use, so there’s no excuse for even a small nonprofit to not be analyzing their online traffic.

9Are you taking advantage of free PPC (Pay Per Click traffic? Google offers Google Grants, which provides free ad budgets to qualified nonprofits. Yahoo has rolled out a similar program, but with limited availability. If you are a nonprofit and are not a religious or political institution, there is no reason not to apply.

We hope these 9 tips will help you drive more search engine traffic to your site. As with the 80/20 rule, you often only need implement a few changes to see significant results. Should you have further questions, feel free to contact us. BlitzLocal, based in Westminster, Colo., specializes in search engine marketing.

Disclosure: BlitzLocal hosts the servers for Socialbrite.org.

The post SEO: 9 tips for optimizing a nonprofit site appeared first on Socialbrite.