Notice how well this website has been designed for SEO? That stands for Search Engine Optimisation and means that your website is likely to get well-rated by search engines like Google. What SEO techniques have ben used on this website?

• All the HTML code in the theme is written to current standards and passes the test for valid code;
• Page titles take this Google-friendly format: Our Trustees | Hillingdon Refugee Support Group;
• URLs mean something, for example the trustees page is at www.hrsg.org.uk/index.php/about-us/trustees/ instead of an address like www.hrsg.org.uk/p=62;
• There’s an XML sitemap at http://www.hrsg.org.uk/sitemap.xml to help Google, Yahoo and MSN to quickly be aware of what’s been published on the site.

On my last day as Baptcare’s website and Intranet editor, my final task was to create a landing page for their charity golf event.

Here’s the result, designed and coded with valid HTML within only a few hours. The design has simple, attractive typography using Baptcare’s corporate colours. However, this landing page looks nothing like the usual template used elsewhere on the Baptcare website, it’s a complete one-off. Baptcare’s usual template is too restrictive, not eye-catching enough to use as a landing page.

What is a landing page? Usually it’s defined as a page that visitors will arrive at directly via an advert or link on another website. A landing pages might not be linked to from an organisation’s own site at all, only from banners or adverts on external sites or from ads on postcards or other printed media.

The golf event page provides links to only two locations: a rollover button and the words “Register Now” in large text, both link to the same PDF brochure; and in the footer is a link to the Baptcare home page. No distractions, just information.

So that was the landing page set up, but how did I make sure that it actually gets landed on? Using our Google Grant I set up multiple free adverts, like the one below, that link to the landing page.

Plus, on the home page of the Baptcare website is a big button that links to the landing page. If anyone reads about the golf day in our newsletter, then visits the website to find out more, they can’t miss it!

Like most charities, we’ve published vacancies on our website and in print. Visitors would see an ad that we’d placed in the jobs section of the local newspaper and then visit the website to download more information - but very few visitors seemed to discover the ads just by searching Google.

Unfortunately, Google isn’t ever completely up-to-date, it updates its indexes every few weeks, so a job vacancy might come and go on the website without Google noticing it (by the way, setting up an XML SiteMap can help Google spot your updates quicker).

However, if you create an ad using Google AdWords it appears immediately to people searching Google for relevant keywords. Plus, if you have a Google Grant then your ad tends to get prioritised above those of for-profit websites. Our charity’s job-related ads have consistently been positioned above those of well known jobfinder websites and usually our ads are in the #1 position for keywords such as “aged care nursing” and “residential care nursing”.

I create an ad on Google for each of our vacancies, with the ad’s URL pointed to the relevant page on our website. I’ve also created a few ads that point to more generic pages on our website on topics such as “Why work for Baptcare” and “Aged care nursing”. These ad campaigns are only displayed to people in Victoria and Tasmania, the areas that we work in.

What’s the happy result?

According to the HR department, we’ve had a big increase in the number of people applying for jobs, and the quality of the applications has not dropped. So our Google Grant has produced a measurable, very practical benefit.

That would an embarrassing end to that topic, if it weren’t for the succcess I’ve had with Baptcare‘s ad campaign, which recently doubled its site traffic. Why is that one nonprofit ad campaign works whilst another doesn’t? Here are some thoughts and ideas…

Doubled your stats you say?

Below are Baptcare’s web stats for the first 15 days of July 2008:

Visits: 1,229
Page views: 4,503

Compare those figures to the first 15 days of August 2008 (after the ad campaign went live):

Visits: 2,435
Page views: 9,184

To put these stats in context, we might have a 5% and 10% rise in stats from one month to the next, but until now, never 50%. What’s the reason for this? Maybe it’s…

Google’s helpful volunteers

A volunteer on Google’s staff regularly goes in to our AdWords account, sets up new adverts and tweaks them to make sure they’re performing well. That’s a great free service, really helpful and their edits can be effective. But it can also be disconcerting, especially when they rename your campaigns, capitalise every word and add exclamation marks to ads that you’ve honed to your own idea of perfection. I know I’m overly pedantic, I fuss about the grammar and punctuation and try to stick to Baptcare’s corporate identity, but Google’s volunteer must know more about what makes a good ad than I do, because their adverts are usually more effective.

Maybe Google’s staff choose to volunteer to support the nonprofits that most interest them, I don’t know quite how the system works but so far no volunteer has helped tweak the Greek Care ads. This may have been one factor in Baptcare’s online advertising success and Greek Care’s lack of it.

Start off by creating lots of ads

For Greek Care I started off with just a few ads and was disappointed by the poor response. Whereas, for Baptcare I quickly set up dozens of ads: some performed well, some didn’t, but at least I could then weed out the poor ads and concentrate on tweaking the click-through-rates of the good ones.

It’s the same story with keywords. Choose at least a dozen for each ad, then weed out the poor-performing keywords later. For an ad for Baptcare’s fostering programme, I initially chose about 20 keywords but when I checked the stats, only a few of those keywords (foster care, fostering, fostering children) were actually pulling in visitors, so I ditched the others.

Then keep weeding and tweaking

AdWords give you detailed stats that show which ads and keywords do and don’t work. Weed out the ones that aren’t getting clicked on. Now start fine-tuning your remaining ads.

Trying setting up several ad variations for an advert. Each version might have very different or just slightly different wording. Google will randomly show one of your ad variations and you can use the stats to find out which one was clicked on the most. This is a great way to test which kind of language works best. For example:

Foster a Child in Need
Temporary carers sought for kids
unable to live at home.

Become A Foster Carer
For Children Unable To Live At Home
Find Out More Through Baptcare. 

Advertise all your services

Don’t just advertise your organisation as a whole, or one or two services. Create ads for everything you do. The more your organisation does, the more you can advertise.

Greek Care is a small, niche website dealing with Greek culture and aged care, whereas Baptcare is a huge nonprofit with services that include residential and community aged care, disability, children and families, asylum seeker accommodation, research and many other areas of work.

It was so easy to go through Baptcare’s website and pick a dozen separate services to advertise, each with a very different potential clientele and very different keyword choices. With the Greek Care website there was less to work with and I will have to try to be more creative.

Link ads to specific pages on your website

Don’t set up dozens of ads that all link back to your home page. If your ad is related to your latest donations appeal, link directly to the landing page for that appeal. The Baptcare website has had big increases in visits to our fostering, residential aged care and vacancies sections because our ads link to their landing pages.

Keep at it

If your ad campaign doesn’t initially do all you’d hoped it would, stick with it. Try different keywords, try ad variations, create a lot of new ads. Keep tweaking, keep experimenting. Having got one online ad campaign off to a successful start, I’m going to go back to the Greek Care campaign and try again. If I’m successful I’ll crow about it in my next post; if not, I might go a bit quiet on the subject for a while!

What is a Google Grant?

It’s free advertising, only available to nonprofit organisations, that shows your ads to people when they perform relevant searches using Google.

You get a Google AdWords account and the ability to create simple or complex ad campaigns. Create an ad (it can be text, an image or even video), decide which page on your website it should link to, then choose the keywords that you want to trigger your ad. Here’s a tutorial.

Boosting a new website’s visits

Before and immediately after the launch of Greek Care, press releases were sent to various online magazines and print publications relevant to aged care. This resulted in a sudden surge of visits but a week later the stats had completely dropped off.

At that time nobody could find the website by using search engines. Websites don’t immediately appear in search results - it can take several weeks - but we sped up the process by creating an XML sitemap and uploading it via Google’s Webmaster Tools.

Unfortunately, even after the site’s pages were listed in Google’s results, our stats told us that visitor numbers were still low. This was a good time to start an online advertising campaign so I applied to Google Grants.

Applying for Google Grants

The application form is simple enough provided you’re well organised. Different countries have different forms (e.g. US, UK and Australia and others) asking different questions. You’ll need to show proof of charitable status, provide contact details, and be able to explain how you think Google Grants will benefit your organisation.

It took only a few weeks to get a response saying that we’d been accepted. We were lucky, other organisations have waited up to six months for a reply.

In their confirmation email Google requested that we set up a normal AdWords account (except that there’s no need to enter credit card details) and let them know our username and a few other details. Within another two weeks we were able to login to AdWords and set up our first online ad campaign.

In Part II : How Baptcare, an Australian nonprofit, benefited from a Google Grant

Here’s a screenshot showing an example of a benchmarking report. The thick blue line is the website being monitored; the thin black line shows the average visits and page views for other, similar-sized charities.

You can choose which type of website to compare your stats with. In the example below I’ve chosen to compare stats with other family and parenting nonprofit websites:

There’s one catch: in order to use the benchmarking service you’ll need to give Google permission to share your stats data with other people. However, since the information is aggregated and made anonymous, it shouldn’t necessarily prevent you from sharing data.

You could use some of these tools to improve your website. How about putting an events calendar on your website which you update by logging into Google? Or using Google Analytics to provide statistical reports for your website? Or applying for free advertising from Google Grants?

I recently used the Calendar tool to put two training calendars onto the Baptcare website. It took about 10 minutes to sign up with Google to create the first calendar and another few minutes to copy the code that Google provides onto a page within our website. I then sent invites to two other staff members so they can input dates and details as new training courses are identified. A quick, easy and effective solution.

1. Is your HTML code valid?

   The code on your website should meet certain standards. Use this free tool to check the pages on your website for errors: http://validator.w3.org. The results are full of techie jargon so let’s make this simple for you: if you get a green banner saying “this page is valid” then your site passed the test; if you get a red message then it failed and you should ask your web designer to correct however many errors are listed.

2. What about your CSS?

   CSS code dictates how your website looks: its fonts, sizes and colours, widths of columns, margins and backgrounds etc. Use this free tool to check the code for errors:  http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator and let your web designer know if you find any.

3. Can Google find the pages on your website?

   Get yourself a Google account and sign up for the free Webmaster tools. The Sitemap tool will tell you whether Google can or cannot reach all the pages on your website. If Google can’t find some of your pages, it probably indicates a web design fault, most likely a problem with your navigation links. You can do a more basic version of this test by simply typing “site:www.yourdomain.org” into Google and checking whether all your pages are listed.

4. Identify the missing links

   The links from your website to external websites will need updating occasionally. Other websites may change their address, delete pages or even disappear completely. Use the W3C’s free Link Checker tool to check individual pages or the Dead Links tool to check an entire site at once  – it may take some time so go make a coffee and come back later.

5. Are font sizes resizable?

   In Internet Explorer select Page > Text > Largest. If all the text on your website increases in size then well done. If not then your site probably uses fixed font sizes e.g. 12pt. Ask your web designer to change them to variable sizes e.g. using percentages or ems. This will benefit visitors with poor eyesight.

6. How many other websites link to your site?

   If your website is to attract visitors you need a lot of other sites to link to yours. You could use Google to find out how many websites link to yours by typing in “link:www.yourdomain.org”. However, if you try the same search in Altavista you’ll actually get a more accurate result. If you find that only a few websites link to you, start emailing other websites in your area of work to politely request a link.

7. Where are your contact details?

   Are your contact details on every page of your website? If not, is there a prominent link to a page with your contact details on it? You should at least provide your address, phone and email and registered charity number. If you expect people to visit your building, a map will also be helpful. You’d be surprised how many charity websites fail this basic test.

8. Check your website statistics

   Every organisation needs statistics for how many people visit their website, how many pages are looked at, which are the most popular pages etc. Start checking your stats monthly and making a note of the number of visitor sessions and page views. Hopefully, if your content is good and you’re promoting your website well, you’ll see a steady increase. If your website is popular, produce a couple of simple graphs for your management committee to show them how worthwhile the website is. If not, start a campaign to get your website noticed.

   Don’t have statistics? Unsure how to understand them? Take a look at some of the discussions on the TechSoup web building forum, especially October 2007′s online event about web analytics.

I’d be very interested to know what results you get. Please come back to this website and leave a comment or ask a question!

Let’s say you are a small AIDS prevention nonprofit in Boise, Idaho.  It’s December 30, and several Boise residents have logged onto Google to find a charity for a…donation/last minute tax deduction.  It’s likely that potential donors will do a Google search for “boise aids charity.”  But if your nonprofit doesn’t pop-up near the top of the search results, these donors may never find you.

That advice makes sense to me because I’m currently working on a long-term SEO campaign for Baptcare‘s website. As a provider of aged care, Baptcare has quite a few competitors and since there are only so many charitable causes that people will give to, it’s important to get our website performing well in Google. First we’ll sort out some coding and accessibility issues; then we’ll rewrite some of the content to make it more compelling; then we’ll look at getting more websites to link to us; and we’ll apply for Google Grants free advertising.

Nancy’s article is called Push Through Fear of SEO to Boost Your Nonprofit’s Online Marketing Results. While you’re on her website, make sure you read her other articles and learn from an expert how to market your charity more effectively.

This post was written as part of the Nonprofit Blog Exchange.