More than a third of websites can expect 80% or more of their website traffic from search engines. Organic searching is also one of the best platforms to reach potential donors as it has been proven to be one of the main avenues audiences spend their money.
Making sure your Michigan non-profit organization website is search engine optimized, is an important step to being noticed by your community and establishing your online and offline presence. Without a good SEO profile for your website, you will find that your Michigan non-profit will not rank highly in search results and could suffer from poor quality traffic (i.e. visitors who have no interest in you).
It is important to not just think of Google when considering SEO. While it is the most used search engine in the US, nearly one in four search queries are entered on Bing.
So what techniques should you employee within your non-profit organization’s online campaign:
Strong Content
While keyword stuffing techniques are no longer relevant, Google and other search engines still rate the content on your page. However, instead of looking for just one word, they can now rate your content based on several words that mean the same: such as online and internet. This is called latent semantic indexing. This helps you to create stronger content for your readers by having variance within your writing, while keeping the same meaning.
You should also look at publishing regular content that can be useful to your audience. For instance, if your non-profit supports healthy living; create topics about how someone can eat more healthy or how to avoid the common cold.
If you operate in a specific geographical location, be sure you are mentioning your local area in your content to rank in local searches.
Inbound Link Strategy
Another factor you should consider is to build links to your website. These links should be highly relevant as you can suffer from a Google penalty if the links aren’t relevant to your content. However, this process doesn’t need to be difficult. Getting yourself mentioned on news sites (with a link to your own website) is one way to obtain links.
Another is to join a service like HARO. This is a three times a day email subscription that allows you to provide information to journalists in exchange for a link to your website. This can be very useful in growing your inbound links quickly and can drive traffic to your website in the short term.
Optimize Images
Many websites don’t optimize their images and this can cause problems. You need to ensure you have high quality images which use the lowest amount of memory possible, so be sure to optimize images for fast download times.
Also you’ll want to have keywords in the description, title, caption and alternate meta tags. This will be picked up by the search engines and contributes to your search engine rank.
Resolve Errors
Google uses over 200 factors to calculate the ranking in their search results. One of those is the errors that are contained on your website. You can free your non-profit website from errors by checking with Google Webmaster tools to see what they recommend.
Site Speed
The speed of your website is very important to Google and your audience. A slow site will be abandoned by visitors and you’ll lose the chance, potentially forever, to gain donations or awareness within the Michigan area.
You can see what improvements are needed to decrease the load time for your website by using Google Insights.
There are several different ways in which you can increase the speed of your site. These include:
- Enabling browser caching
- Minifying HTML, JavaScript and CSS
- Limiting the amount of memory that images take up on your page
- Enable compression
- Use a quality hosting package that uses the best hosting techniques
Regular Blog Content
Blogging is one of the best ways in which you can gain a steady SEO presence online. By posting regularly on your blog you can increase the ranking of your website. Google will see this as evidence of your non-profit organization being highly active online.
Regular blog posts will also increase the number of pages and rate of indexing your website and the interaction your site has. Organizations that blog regularly can receive more traffic than those that do not blog at all.
Social Media Content
As well as concentrating on your website, you should also look at your social media. Social media is becoming a significant part of the search engine rank of your site. Twitter is used by Google to index your pages faster, Bing uses Facebook likes in their ranking formulation and LinkedIn and Google+ blog posts can be indexed and are used for ranking purposes.
If you can create a good social media campaign then you can gain awareness through your profiles and also gain a better SEO profile.
Conclusion
Search engine optimization is important if you want your Michigan non-profit organization to be visible through search engines. Using the above tips, you can ensure your website ranks highly on all search engines. This will draw audiences to your website and increase the interaction you will receive.
Take Action
- Read our post on why Yoast’s WordPress plugin is an excellent way to increase your SEO.
- Implement some of the suggestions above to improve your SEO.
What is your top SEO tip? Contact us and let us know.
by NJE Design