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.
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.
Eric Kim is founder of Twylah, a tool that transforms your tweets into a custom fan page (see mine here).
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.
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.
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).
Simply stated, SEO is about getting more high-quality leads with your blog.
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.
I write 12-20 blog posts a month.
About 30 percent of my clients find me through search. Getting higher rankings on Google means more business.
My time is extremely valuable. Amen, if SEO can be streamlined.
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.
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.
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.
Most people treat Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as black magic. While there are unethical methods to inflate your search engine rankings — cloaking, doorways pages, link farms, “google bombing,” dupe content poisoning, keyword stuffing, and so forth — these tactics are short-lived and can even get you banned. Folks who employ these tricks (also known as “black hat SEOs”) are in a cat-and-mouse war with search engines, as loopholes are being exploited, found and closed.
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.
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.