Online fundraising requires balance between SEO & Social Media (part 3)

Welcome back to the Miratel blog and today we’re going to be completing our look at how nonprofits need to balance the use of social media and SEO to help build awareness and increase their online audience. In our overview there are a number of useful tips that can kick start your online fundraising results, in part one we looked at the importance of social media and how to blend in SEO tactics. Then we looked at creating content along with proper keyword research and use in part two of our series.

Today we’ll conclude with some other SEO recommendations that will help your website in being indexed by search engines and ultimately can lead to improved keyword rankings which are at the heart of organic traffic to your site. Organic traffic is the opposite of paid traffic/pay per click and is built around the ongoing efforts to add, revise and improve your website content on a regular basis.

Get the balance right

Last time I touched on the importance of rich content within your site and blog posts, consider your audience and your overall keyword strategy at all times. Clearly conveying the important messages about what your charity does and how people can help must be at the core of your writing and is not a stand alone concept that should oppose your keyword and meta strategies. Oftentimes people focus their sites too heavily towards keywords and SEO goals and the content ends up reading in that fashion, coming across as being unnaturally written which fails to accomplish the primary goal of informing your audience. Compose structured and informative content and your keyword/meta options will reveal themselves naturally after you’ve proofed and edited what you’ve written.

When to add content

Once again more content is always better so long as every page has;

1. an identified purpose
2. is not duplicating content found elsewhere on your site
3. is easy to find via a structured approach to navigation.

If all three objectives are met add as many pages as you wish to your site and keep adding in the future as new opportunities present themselves, in many cases that leads to the development of a blog within your site.

Remember that all search engines are crawling your website by using the text, therefore what is crawled is text. The more text you have the more will be crawled and indexed while website with little or no written content looks essentially empty to a search engine. Avoid the currently fashionable ‘one page websites’ which are look great on mobile devices but only provide you with one landing page and one set of metas which seriously curtails your seo potential.

Text versus images

While it is true that readers enjoy images, graphics, infographics and videos when visiting a site – written text holds much more SEO value and an over-reliance on the former brings poorer SEO results. However don’t forget that every image, graphic and even buttons can have tags added to them which should also be refined to match your keyword targets. For example don’t add a green button icon that links to a page for donations and give the icon an alt-tag of ‘green button’, use an alt-tag such as ‘donate-to-detroit-education-nonprofit’ using your own keywords within.

Links

Links are also a very important element of SEO which I’ll briefly touch on. Each and every external (inbound) link that is pointing to your website allows a search engine to know that you exist and the more inbound links directed to your site the better in terms of helping your site get indexed. Links from the most popular sites (those with higher visits) carry more link value and this is a major consideration for search engines. Avoid schemes such as link farms or link exchanges but focus on being mentioned (and linked) by websites that partner with or recommend your organization.

Structure

Don’t overlook the key importance of building a website with an emphasis on having a good organized structure. You want your readers navigation to have a natural flow as they explore all of the information contained within the site. Spend time building and testing (on paper) some navigation ideas which naturally take a reader from one page to the next, at the end of each page ask yourself the most likely pages that they would want to explore next.

Remember that both the reader and search engines want to find the content most relevant to them in the fewest amount of clicks so beware of burying good content too deeply within the structure of the site. Your homepage will ultimately receive the most visits and carry the greatest SEO value but make sure that your secondary landing pages are given a lot of thought about how best to help your reader understand the site and navigate further from that point.

Space limits me from covering everything but also take the time to learn about sitemaps, directories, plugins, inner-linking and use the many free tools that are available online. SEO has no magic bullet or easy fix but is a concerted effort to build out deep and relevant content for your site and keep refining what you have while measuring what is working well and fixing what is not. Good luck in your endeavours and I’d be happy to answer any questions in the comments section.
___________________________________________________________________________________ For nonprofit, nonprofit fundraising, CSR business and other news, connect with us on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Pinterest or subscribe to our RSS feed. Miratel Solutions is a Toronto call centre, eBusiness, and letter shop mail house specializing in professional fundraising services including PCI compliant inbound telephone fundraising, outbound telephone fundraising, online fundraising, lottery fundraising services, donation processing and receipting and direct mail fundraising services. We are committed to our CSR business values in all our business decisions and advancing the missions of the nonprofits we proudly serve.