Nonprofit Fundraising Technology Tips – who is linking to your site

The inner workings of your website, blog and social media to help raise the overall awareness of your nonprofit fundraising organization aren’t always easy to decipher but some of the tips that I hope will provide the most value tend to be the easiest of all to master. Helping to steer relevant (by which I mean genuinely interested) traffic to your website or blog should be the key motivation behind everything you do to promote your nonprofit in the online world. If your website or blog gets 300 visits daily but only 20% of those visits are targeted traffic and the other 80% leave your site in a few seconds just how valuable are those 300 visits in the first place? There is more defined value in 150 visitors per day when 60% of those are relevant visitors to your site, with an inherent interest in what your organization is doing and looking deeper into your site or blog. By relevant traffic there are two very important considerations at the top of the list when looking at site traffic, keyword traffic for words that are part of your nonprofit’s description and linked traffic from other sites, or indeed from your own site or social media.

You can try and determine your current external links by reviewing your site analytics and reviewing which sites drive traffic to yours, but that won’t provide the complete picture. To get a more comprehensive understanding of the active external links to your site you need to be able to review a list. Until recently I’d been using google’s ‘link:’ option or using the quotations around the site url which provides a list of all links, but many of them will be internal links or social media links that don’t provide much value to you when it comes to assessing which links are in theory the most valuable. Moreover the results weren’t terribly consistent or accurate.

Instead I’d now recommend a tool called Open Site Explorer which is linked here. Open Site Explorer allows you to review a live summary of internal and external links to your domain. Critically it also allows you to see what the links are, the page authority of the referring site overall (in general terms – the popularity of that referring site) and the page authority of the page that is linking to you. In addition from the site itself you can visit the links and test them. Also on the site you from the top navigation tabs you can also review your individual pages which are linked most often, which domains link most frequently which is great for checking your social media growth and a summary/report page to get a snapshot of your links.

Internal links do of course hold value but trying to build your external links toward and then over 50% of all existing links is a great goal. Don’t get weighed down by all of the reporting and data available, use the tool to see where you link, which links are valuable and track your progress. Link building takes time and a page authority score above 30 will take some time if your online campaign is new. Another great benefit is looking at how other sites are performing in terms of overall links, domain links, page authority and domain authority. You can even compare two sites side-by-side if you wish.

side-by-side link comparison (click on image to enlarge)

I recommend OSE because it’s accurate, easy to use, you can download reports and it’s free. There is a paid subscription service which allows you to extend the depth of the reporting but I think that the free version with registration can instantly provide you with some great benefits. Let me know how the tool works for you and if you have any general questions please feel free to get in touch with me.