Target audience: Nonprofits, NGOs, cause organizations, social enterprises, businesses, brands, bloggers, social media managers, individuals.

On Wednesday I gave a presentation with author and nonprofit rock star Beth Kanter at CompassPoint‘s “Effective Social Media Strategy and Powerful Tactics for Networked Nonprofits,” a gathering that brought representatives from 80 nonprofits to San Mateo, Calif., for workshops to help them become more social organizations.

The session that Beth and I gave centered on topic that’s too often neglected in the nonprofit sector: measurement. See the SlideShare presentation above for the gist of my talk.

While most of you have heard of Google Analytics, Facebook Insights and even a host of Twitter dashboards and Twitter influence tools, I’ll wager that few of you have heard of SEMRush, a service that spotlights the keywords your nonprofit site or blog ranks for on major search engines (OK, on Google).

Socialbrite ranks No. 1 on a range of nonprofit topics

See not only the 22-slide presentation, but also tutorials and articles that help organizations learn how to use metrics effectively.

I was surprised, in researching my presentation, that Socialbrite.org ranks as the No. 1 search result on the entire Web for anyone searching on these terms:

• Socialbrite is the #1 search result on the Web for “fundraising tools.”
• Socialbrite is the #1 search result on the Web for “sms campaign” and “sms campaigns”
• Socialbrite is the #1 search result on the Web for “social media monitoring tools”
• Socialbrite is the #1 search result on the Web for “social media dashboard” (though my results show us slightly lower)
• Socialbrite is the #1 search result on the Web for “corporate social responsibility examples”
• Socialbrite is the #2 search result on the Web for “virtual meeting”

How do we do it? By creating content that’s relevant and useful to the social change community — naturally and organically, without gimmicks. (Do your search results differ? Sometimes they do.)

As I mentioned in the talk, these kind of niche, Long Tail keywords may not get tens of thousands of people searching on them every month, but those who do search out these keyword phrases are the people you want to attract to your site. Start by using the Google keyword tool to identify key phrases that are relevant to your sector, cause or organization’s mission. Then start using them by naturally sprinkling them — only where relevant — in your titles, posts and tags — and soon you’ll see them appear at the top tier of Google search results.

That’s what you want. Nobody clicks to the second screen of a Google search result.

Then, come back and SEMRush will tell you which of those keywords and phrases your site now ranks for.

Go ahead, do a search on SEMRush by plunking in your site’s url. What does your nonprofit, social business or organization rank for right now?

The post Why Long Tail keywords matter to your nonprofit appeared first on Socialbrite.

If you use Twitter for your nonprofit, you’ve probably been able to meet amazing people, form unexpected alliances and find relevant conversations that you wouldn’t have found anywhere else.

But there is one big problem with Twitter.

Tweets lose juice. Fast.

The graph above is a perfect example of a typical tweet’s lifespan. Born at noon, in the grave by 4 pm the same day.

Twylah gives tweets longer tails

Eric Kim is founder of Twylah, a tool that transforms your tweets into a custom fan page (see mine here).

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.

How Twylah gives your tweets more traffic

As explained in the above graph, Twylah gives your tweets more life, simply because they stick around more on your Twylah page.

Twylah also gives juice to your SEO (search engine optimization). With Twylah your tweets are:

• Organized in search-engine-optimized topical pages.
• Discoverable on Google and Bing as topical, contextual collections of tweets.
• Presented to a search audience in a much friendlier format.

Twylah looks  beautiful

Finally, one thing you’ll notice about Twylah is how beautifully content is displayed on a single page. This no doubt is one of the reasons why Twylah has the impact it does.

Sign up for Twylah here.

What do you guys think about Twylah?

The post How to make your tweets last longer with Twylah 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.

If you’re using a blog to promote your nonprofit or small business, a large part of your strategy is about getting found on Google – otherwise known as search engine optimization (SEO).

SEO is the practice of improving the traffic to a website from your website’s organic results on Google. If you don’t understand the value of SEO for your nonprofit, ask yourself the following question: “How would sending people to our website precisely when they’re interested in our cause impact our online fundraising?”

Simply stated, SEO is about getting more high-quality leads with your blog.

What is WordPress SEO?

Most nonprofits know very little about WordPress SEO. What are title tags? What is a meta description? And how important is the prevalence of keywords?

On top of this, blogging is only 1 percent of your job. You also manage your Facebook Page, organize events, write the email newsletter and explain what Twitter is to board members.

CopyBlogger SEO

Last month, Brian Clark (@CopyBlogger) announced the Scribe WordPress SEO plug-in (yes, that is an affiliate link). I purchased the plug-in as soon as it was announced for four reasons:

1. I write 12-20 blog posts a month.
2. About 30 percent of my clients find me through search. Getting higher rankings on Google means more business.
3. My time is extremely valuable. Amen, if SEO can be streamlined.
4. Brian Clark is a leading authority on SEO copywriting and publishes CopyBlogger. In short, smart cookie.

The Scribe SEO WordPress plug-in is not free, so I don’t recommend it if you’re only writing two to three posts a month or have SEO expertise. I also wouldn’t recommend it if your primary goals for blogging do not include ranking higher in Google searches.

If you are interested in Scribe, I’ve included a few screenshots of how I used it for this blog post.

WordPress SEO score

Scribe gives you a ist of recommendations to improve the findability of your content on major search engines. You can also reanalyze the effects your edits have on the content analysis SEO score.

Google SERP preview

Scribe allows you to see how your title tags and meta description will appear on Google:

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Scribe also gives you instant feedback about what SEO elements need to be completed in your blog post.

If you want to learn more, visit ScribeSEO.Com.

The post A WordPress plug-in to simplify SEO appeared first on Socialbrite.

Welcome to the 31 Day Challenge To Optimize Your Blog With Social Media. Today guest contributor Michael Martine will offer tips on how to optimize your most visited blog pages.

Guest post by Michael Martine
remarkablogger

Are you leaving money and opportunity on the table? You might be if you haven’t optimized your blog’s most visited pages. You should know what the most popular pages are on your blog and look for opportunities to optimize them for better reader engagement and conversion.

This is what web analytics is really for — not just visitor counts. What is working on your site? What isn’t? Analytics will tell you by revealing patterns of visitor behavior so you can make better content and conversion decisions. One thing nearly any analytics program, such as the free Google Analytics, will tell you is what your blog’s most visited pages are.

Take a look at your blog’s “top 10.” Are you surprised by which pages are the most popular? I hope not, because that means you’re having trouble matching your blog’s content to your goals (expect a couple of surprises in there, though). For example, my analytics told me that one of the most popular pages on my blog is the post How to Add a Blog to a Website.

Because of this post, that exact phrase and its derivatives are common searches that land people on that exact page. This was deliberate: it’s what search engine optimization (SEO) is for and why you should learn about it. Without the content there, no searches about this topic would ever reach me.

That sounds obvious, but I’m constantly surprised by bloggers who say their blog is about a topic … but then the topic’s keywords aren’t in the posts they write! If the words aren’t in the content, then that’s not what your blog is about as far as Google is concerned, and your ideal visitors will fail to show up at your doorstep via search. T

So find-tune your blog so that you have popular pages you can take advantage of. That’s next.

How to make popular pages work harder for you

If your blog has a conversion goal, you want to create blog content in support of that goal. Most blogs at least have the conversion goal of growing subscribers. If your blog is the marketing for a business or a nonprofit, you need more. You should have an email list that goes beyond the blog. You may also have products or services to sell, which means you want to direct people to those pages.

Knowing that, you try the following ideas to make your popular blog pages work harder for you:

• Keep updating and adding to popular posts to increase its value as the situation and times change. Every time you do this, send an email out to your list to let them know you’ve just updated and that you’d love their comments on it. (I learned this from Michel Fortin.) This will increase long-term traffic and backlinks to the page, which will, in turn, strengthen its authority in search.
• Create a “best of” or “popular” links list on your home page. These always drive traffic. When a page is popular, we want to figure out ways to make it even more popular, because popularity leads to greater popularity. The long-term benefits of this are the same as the previous point on updating.
• Write new posts that build on an older popular post. Not only should you link to the old post from the new one, you should also go edit the old one to include a link to the new one. Make sure you use the same keywords in for each in your post titles and in the anchor text you use to link them (anchor text is the words of the hyperlink). Why? So that you end up with a double indented listing in Google. And of course, this event warrants an email to your list (these tactics overlap).
• Create a product around the topic of a popular post. This is what I did with my post about adding a blog to a website. I figured if people were searching on that keyword and reaching me, it would be a good idea to provide visitors an opportunity to get in-depth information for a minimal investment. The strategy has been a great success. I created an inexpensive ebook about the topic and updated the post with information about it and a buy button. I get sales every week.
• Rewrite the headline and slug of a popular post. This one is a little risky, but can help you take a performing post and get it to perform even stronger for you. If a post is snagging searches for a keyword, you can often boost it by taking the important keyword and move it to an earlier word position in the headline. You can strengthen a keyword by making it plural or singular, whichever has more searches (this is where keyword research comes in). If you’re using the Headway theme or an SEO plugin, you can easily separate post headlines from the slug, which is like the file name of the post. In order to do this without breaking any existing backlinks to the post, you’ll need a redirect plugin for WordPress (a quick search will reveal several). If you’re not using self-hosted WordPress, or you don’t have a redirect plugin, don’t try this.

Give it a go

Homework: Go check out your blog’s most popular posts (after tweeting about this one, of course). Then try one or more of the methods above to make it work even harder for you.

If you don’t want to miss out on the 31 Day Challenge To Optimize Your Blog With Social Media, please sign up here.

Cross-posted from JohnHaydon.com.

The post How to optimize your most visited blog pages 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.