In this week’s edition of SEO Odds & Ends, I’m shifting gears into the nonprofit SEO space. I came across Liberty Hill Foundation’s website and found their slogan to be impressive–”30 Years of Change, Not Charity.” As a fan of participating in change instead of throwing money at problems, this spoke to me and I thought I’d help out.

First off, there is a great resource online for any nonprofit out there–a charity version of SEO Book. With 25 chapters, I must admit I haven’t combed through it all, but if you have the time, it gives a lot of great SEO information tailored to nonprofits.

As with many nonprofits, marketing in general gets put on the back burner, because money could be better spent on making things happen rather than getting a shiny website, right? That seems to be the case with Liberty Hill, as well. Here are the top tips I’d start with for their site:

1. Create a specific page for each of the organization’s issues. 
             
   • Even if it seems that the issues cross over a lot, create each page to be as different as possible, and then link between similar pages. A well-optimized site involves giving the search engines a single page for each idea your organization (and website) represents.
   • For Liberty Hill, initiatives related to developing a green economy and promoting environmental justice are extremely important. There are multiple pages about this, including the 2009 Environmental Agenda “Turn Green to Gold”, a donor page explaining what Environmental Justice is, and finally, a grant seekers page describes the funds available.
   • To organize the site a bit more from a search engine perspective, first, organize the group’s initiatives into a category such as “Liberty Hill Issues,” then add specific pages with descriptive content for Environmental Justice, Gay/Lesbian Rights, etc., third, add links on the Environmental Justice page to the Donors, Grant Seekers, and Media/Press pages devoted to this topic.
2. Pick keywords for each issue your organization represents, and optimize your tags for those terms. 
   • Using the Google Adwords keyword tool, you can find the approximate search volume for terms related to your organization’s issues.
   • For the Environmental Justice issue, there isn’t much search volume for many terms beyond “California Environmental Justice” and “Los Angeles Environmental Justice.” Therefore, creating a title tag using this code would probably be be the best option:

     <title>Environmental Justice | Los Angeles, California
     | Liberty Hill Foundation</title>

   • On the Liberty Hill Blog, there are several stories about undocumented students and the hardships they face–keywords such as “Scholarships For Undocumented Students” and “Undocumented Students in California” would be good options to target on the primary site.
3. Use variations of your keywords within the content on each page of your site.
   • Often adding a city name plus the primary keywords for a page is a good start.
   • Within the content of the page, use variations of this broad term by starting with “Environmental Justice” and adding the following words: “solution(s),” “project(s),” “action,” “group.” Always focus on making the content readable and relevant to your readers, optimization is a second priority.
   • On the current site, the Environmental Justice Fund is introduced this way:
     
     

     Liberty Hill is pleased to announce our new grantmaking program, the Fund for Change…Liberty Hill will hold two webinars and four community workshops across Los Angeles to introduce our new grantmaking program. 

   • An optimized phrase from an SEO perspective would be:
     

     Liberty Hill is pleased to announce our new Environmental Justice project, the Fund for Change…Liberty Hill will hold two webinars and four community workshops in conjunction with various Los Angeles Environmental Justice groups to announce our new grantmaking program. 

4. Ask for links from your donors and grant recipients!           
   • The single most valuable thing for a website to have in order to have better visibility in the search engines is links! Get more links! This, of course, can be an extremely time consuming process, hence its inclusion at the bottom of this list.
   • Request optimized links– include the keyword assigned to that issue in the text of the link. For example, “Thanks to Liberty Hill Foundation, and specifically their gay and lesbian rights grant initiatives, for supporting the Cara a Cara Latino AIDS Project,” or in the ALT attribute of an image link: “Liberty Hill Foundation Logo, great resource for environmental justice information in Los Angeles.”
   • When donors inquire about giving money or resources, mention to them that simply adding a link to the Liberty Hill Foundation from a donor company’s website, the donor’s personal blog, or even their Facebook page would help you out. Ask them to link to the particular issue on Liberty Hill’s website that is of interest to them, as oppposed to the homepage.
   • Require that recipients of grants mention the Liberty Hill Foundation website through a post or a link of some sort! If they’ve received $20,000, a link from their site to the grant site shouldn’t be a major effort for them.

SEO is an ongoing process–do what you can when redesigning a website or when there are specks of free time, but don’t ignore it entirely! A little bit of effort each week (or month!) is better than none.

If you have specific questions for your nonprofit, please ask them in the comments below.

Link: Best Practices for Product Search

Love: optimizing your universal search presence.  The natural search results aren’t the only results that deserve optimization attention.  Universal search requires a holistic approach to SEO where you need to also focus on optimizing for local, blogs, videos, images, and if you have an e-commerce website, product search which makes an appearance in the search results as shopping results.  Check out the Product Search for Webmasters video from Google on how you can go about optimizing for shopping results.  Also, you’ll need a Google Base account in order to get started with the optimization.

Link: Pagerank Sculpting

Love: focusing your efforts on more important things…I kid (sort of), the news from Google that Pagerank sculpting does not work as SEO’ers thought is important.  The Google man himself Matt Cutts explains it on his blog.  The basics:

• Your page has a Pagerank score of 8
• It has 4 outgoing links
• Left as is, each link passes along 2 points of Pagerank, 8 divided by 4
• Previously, if 2 of those links pointed at less important pages, “Contact Us” and “About Us” for example, some SEOs would nofollow those links
• In doing so, it was believed this allowed the other 2 links to pass along 4 points of Pagerank rather than 2
• Pagerank sculpted
• Now, nofollowing those important links does not pass Pagerank points in this simple way and requires Pagerank sculpting using a number of other techniques

Here is a SEOmoz post of the topic that also provides pros and cons from the SEO perspective.

Link: SocialMention

Love: simple and reliable tools that allow you to track your company and its keywords across multiple channels – blogs, microblogs (Twitter, FriendFeed), social bookmarks, comments (blog, forum or otherwise), news, video and more.  It’s extremely easy to get bogged down with tools just as it is with too much data.  Personally, I tend to stick with those that are simple, efficient and reliable and do not often switch unless the tools will allow me to provide even more actionable insight – Occam wins.  SocialMention is simple and reliable.  Not only are you provided with links to blogs, blog comments, Q&A sites, social bookmarks, and more, that mention your company or keywords, but SocialMention also provides data on sentiment (positive to negative mentions), reach (number of unique authors mentioning the entered keyword) and other metrics.

Link: 10 Ways to Make Your Site Accessible Using Web Standards

Love: making your website not only able to be found, but actually accessible to everyone. Think of the user.  Remain outwardly focused (just like phenomenal non-profits). Not everyone uses the same setup for surfing the internet, so you should ensure nearly all users are able to actually find information on your site once they’ve found you on the search engines.  There are a few pointers in this post that play a role in SEO:

• Supply proper meta tags – small piece of the pie, but a piece of the pie nonetheless
• Use accesible navigation – descriptive title and header tags provide keyword relevancy and help structure your site, which can help improve the ability of Google to provide Site InLinks
• Supply alternative content for images

Link: Bing Whitepaper for Webmasters and Publishers

Love: when you get information about search from the mouths of the leviathans.  This whiteapaper, distributed by Microsoft, details features of Bing, the layout of the search results page, the structure and details of the search results page and much more information.

BONUS Link Love Laughter Section: The Year The Media Died

As an Account Manager at Apogee Search, Kate van Ravenhorst has helped various clients implement website redesigns. Through her experiences Kate has discovered a few best practices for implementing a successful website redesign, and she was kind enough to share her knowledge with me.

When a company chooses to employ a website redesign there are a variety of motivating factors, but no matter why you decide to redesign your site, it is important to consider SEO throughout the process.

First, look at the organization of your website’s content. It is important that multiple pages within your site don’t compete for the same keywords. Kate suggests placing web pages that may cause an issue on different levels within the site’s hierarchy. Higher level pages are assigned higher value within search engines.

Maintaining site value is also important during a website redesign. It is helpful to preserve the existing URL structure from your original website. It is also useful to organize content in logical folder names and incorporate keywords into the URLs where appropriate. Additionally, redirects are crucial in maintaining a website’s value. A 301 redirect guides visitors to the appropriate page on your new site. 301 redirects are also the most search engine friendly web page redirection method because they allow the search engines to attribute the value of the old page to the new one. This will also help avoid having visitors encounter 404 errors for web pages that no longer exist if they arrived at your site through an old link or bookmark.

Ensure the search engines can find your new site by using HTML and XML site maps. An HTML site map lets visitors navigate your site with ease, as well as allows the search engine spiders to access the entirety of your site. XML site maps are important because they are designed specifically for search engines. They allow search engines to crawl a site more thoroughly and alert search engines of new pages. Creating a Google Webmaster Tools account is also useful, because it will provide you with general diagnostic information, notify you of indexing issues, and accelerate the indexing of your site.

Finally, you must reconfigure your tracking. If you use Google Analytics, or another analytics tool, remember to preserve historical data from your old site and create a new profile to track activity on your new site.

There is likely to be some fluctuation in rankings as you implement a redesign, but these tips will help you diminish any potential negative affects.

When a new year rolls around, a flurry of activity usually occurs with businesses wanting to create new websites. On one hand, this makes sense – many times, marketing budgets are renewed, or maybe the holiday season went better than planned so there is extra cash to invest in the company. From a search engine perspective though, creating a new website for either of these two reasons is not necessarily a good idea.

Reasons why you don’t want to burn down your old site and start over from scratch:

• Cost: Website design and development are expensive. For a mid-sized website (100-500 pages), a complete overhaul will probably cost you $5-10K. That cost doesn’t necessarily mean more conversions either – websites do not adhere to the “if you build it, they will come” idea.
• Domain Age: Search engines prefer old domains not old content. Domain age is one of over 100 variables that affects your site’s overall ability to rank for (and thus drive traffic through) keywords related to your business. If your site has been around since 2003 and your competitor’s has been around since 1999, their site will always be scored higher than yours for that variable.
• Domain Authority: This variable in the search engine algorithm is one of the hardest to explain. Some important qualifiers are:
  • if your site has past penalties or not
  • if your site has accurate information
  • if your site is linked within a “good neighborhood”
• Aged Links: It’s no secret in the SEO world that links are a good idea. Usually for a company site, links have been naturally added to the site over time – maybe a new client released a press release about hiring your firm, perhaps an organization you joined added a link to your company on your bio page, or maybe your company joined the local BBB and received a link back to your company’s website. Those links have aged over the years, and the search engines take those into account when they are measuring the value of your site.

So, what should you do at the beginning of a new year? It’s not that a website face lift is a bad thing. In fact, it can be very beneficial to the success of your website. With a few tweaks to the effectiveness of your website, you can potentially double (or even triple) your conversion rate. Pursuing search engine optimization through link building and appropriate tagging can also drastically increase the traffic to your site. Simply updating the content on your site on a regular basis will cause the search engines to notice and value your site even more for its fresh content.

By simply improving your current site rather than burning it down completely, you are protecting the value your website has already gained in the search engines over time, and this will ultimately boost the overall success of your website.

It’s a proud day today at Apogee Search.

We officially announced that Google has recognized Apogee Search as a Google Website Optimizer™ Authorized Consultant (WOAC). We are one of a select group of companies worldwide (currently only 16 total) that have been awarded this recognition by Google.

“This prestigious certification from Google Website Optimizer reflects our willingness to invest our time and resources ahead of the curve to ensure our clients become better consumers of Google offerings. We’re honored to have acquired significant expertise and knowledge with Google Website Optimizer, and we expect that this new practice will be a very popular service offering in 2009, as it can dramatically improve the ROI of online marketing campaigns across the board,” said Apogee Search CEO Bill Leake.

Google Website Optimizer (GWO) is a testing tool that performs A/B and Multivariate testing on websites, landing pages and other web properties to help online advertisers increase their conversion rates. The results from these tests can determine the most effective combination of content and landing page design.

To be considered for this accreditation, WOAC applicants must have a verifiable track record of success using Google Website Optimizer, be a recognized industry participant in online marketing services, and be committed to improving online marketing techniques.

“We have already had proven client results using Google’s optimization technology, and this deeper collaboration with Google demonstrates our commitment not only to provide results, but also to generate empirical data for our clients on what is working for them and what is not, to ensure long term success,” said Alissa Ruehl, Manager of Website Effectiveness Consulting.

Jason Kapler, Marketing Programs Manager at Asure Software said, “Apogee Search was a tremendous partner in helping us implement Google Website Optimizer. They educated us on the value of the tool and then helped us implement a program that improved our conversion rates by 216%! Needless to say, now all of our campaigns use GWO when applicable.”

As an authorized consultant, Apogee Search offers highly skilled Google Website Optimizer set-up, support, training, and consultation services.

If you’d like to learn more about Google Website Optimizer, check out this video interview from our resident website effectiveness expert Alissa Ruehl as she discusses some helpful tips and tricks in working with GWO.

I recently spoke with Alissa Ruehl, Manager of Website Effectiveness Consulting at Apogee Search. She offered some helpful information about Google Website Optimizer (GWO).

Alissa began by explaining that Google Website Optimizer is a free tool that website owners can use to determine the most effective combination of content on their site through a variety of tests. The results from these tests can then be used to maximize conversion rates among existing traffic to your site.

GWO can conduct both A/B testing and multivariate testing. A/B testing will test two different pages against one another, and multivariate testing will test the various elements on the page to determine the best combination.

Alissa then offered a few strategies to keep in mind when using Google Website Optimizer:

• Ask big questions. You will only receive answers for the things that you actively test. You should test drastic changes rather than slight changes to obtain statistically significant data.
• Spend time developing well-written copy to test.
• Wait for significant data. GWO will indicate when a sample is large enough to be useful.

Alissa pointed out that there are different situations in which one would want to use A/B testing versus multivariate testing:

• Multivariate tests compare different elements of a page. Google uses a full factorial test so it is very easy to generate a large number of combinations even when testing just a few elements. These tests require a high amount of traffic to achieve statistical significance.
• A/B testing is suited for sites with less traffic because it requires a much smaller sample size to achieve statistical significance. This is the best option for testing a complete site redesign.

Finally, Alissa offered a few rules to follow when using Google Website Optimizer:

• Wait for statistically significant data. As discussed earlier, initial results might reflect random chance, so wait until you have had enough traffic for the information to be significant.
• Limit the elements being tested. If you create too many different combinations, it will take a great deal of time for GWO to produce meaningful results from your test.
• Spend as much time developing content for a test as you would for a website. Even though this is a test, you are testing potential real options for your site. Do not get sloppy with the content just because it is a test.

Not long ago I blogged about research done by Google on the OpenID platform. Let’s do a quick rehash (cue NFL Primetime music. No, seriously, open a link in another tab and listen as you read):

What is OpenID?
“OpenID eliminates the need for multiple usernames across different websites, simplifying your online experience.”

Why should I care about OpenID?
According to the same report by Google, “[o]ne of the biggest reasons the industry has focused on federated login is to minimize the work required for a user to signup for a new account at a website.  When users are presented with a traditional signup page that asks for E-mail, password, & password confirmation, it is quite common for 30 to 50% of users to not finish the process.” Couple this 30% to 50% number with the fact that the average user visits 11 pages within a website, spending 43.62 seconds on each page for a total of 8 minutes spent on site and you’ll see that annoying users with a signup form will only shrink the already paltry amount of time they generally stay on a page. And think, creating a simplified login/signup process was basically completely out of your control.

Google and OpenID
Today Google announced they are providing web services with limited access to an API based on the OpenID protocol which is based on the user experience research of the OpenID community.

Users will be able to sign into certain websites using their Google account credentials without having to sign up for a new account at the websites. Zoho, Plaxo and Buxfer are among the initial launch partners.

With Google now joining Microsoft and Yahoo! in spreading the OpenID protocol to the masses, it looks like the user experience will improve for many people, and businesses could see an increase in sales from that 30% to 50% of individuals who would rather continue surfing than fill out a login/signup form.

How much is a keyword in your URL worth? If money is no object, how does $185,000 sound? ICANN, the governing body of domain registration, has proposed this as the price for buying a new top-level domain (TLD). So instead of www.thehatstore.com being your website’s URL, that’s the cost to enable you (and conceivably any other haberdasher) to register www.thehatstore.hats, www.cowboy.hats, www.top.hats, and more.

Imagine the appeal of www.nike.shoes, www.ford.trucks, and its eventual impact on Google’s search algorithm as the trend begins to grow. If you can pay the steep entrance fee, you too can get in on the ground level of what may be an interesting new source of optimization. This is especially salient for those in the area of eCommerce, where a seller may specialize in a particular area of products, but have a multitude of different types of products. Therefore, instead of having one large, cluttered website for selling a vast array of candy, www.thecandystore.com could build or buy a scalable eCom model that is implemented across a series of websites, such as halloween.candy, easter.candy, hard.candy, chocolate.candy, and more.

What would this lend to an eCommerce business model? Each of these sites could improve their focus on a larger series of keywords for each sub-area of candy without diluting or convoluting the content of their website. Indexability and keyword salience are both major problems for these business models. Splitting the site on sensible points of cleavage would be a viable solution given the current state of search engines. The top-level domains would be even more informative to the semantic content of the site, just as it is assumed now that “.edu” domains are EDUcational and “.org” domains are ORGanizations.

In the future, it may be valuable for professional organizations in specific areas of selling, reselling, and services to pool together their resources to buy these top-level domains for the good of all of its clients, who may then have the opportunity to participate in the race for the best domain names within these top-level domains.

A recent study undertaken by Opera, the browser development company, finds that only 4.13% of the web complies to W3C standards. What this means for SEO is that search engine developers need to build applications that are prepared to deal with “junk code”. Because of this, more than likely, what you’re optimizing for is being reached by Google.

So why could being non-compliant still be a problem? Because engineers who make it their business to make the web work, such as search engine and browser developers, need to account for non-compliant code, they tend to focus on only a small amount of the most popular websites and assume that they encompass the normal amount of deviation from W3C compliance. (Google’s Chrome browser absolutely works under this assumption, as divulged in their comic)

More than likely, you’re not making the same mistakes that top traffic-driving sites are making; you’re making your own mistakes. It’s natural, and it’s okay. However, it reduces the likelihood that your site will be machine-readable, even with the fail-safes in place made by these designers.

So in order to make your site have a uniform look and absolute machine readability, your best chance is by getting your code up to compliance. There’s more than likely not a penalty for being non-compliant, but the converse certainly improves your chances at ranking for the keywords you’re targeting.

How do you get started with making sure your site is W3C-compliant? Validate it here.

Google announced the launch of their Webmaster Tools Access Provider Program last week on their official blog. The idea of this program is to introduce as many webmasters as possible to Google Webmaster Tools, which launched back in 2006.

The idea of this program is great. Google has made Webmaster Tools more accessible to the average webmaster by allowing domain hosters the ability to use Google’s APIs to get their customers started with Webmaster Tools, and I fully support Google attracting more users to Webmaster Tools.

I highly recommend that all webmasters, new and old alike, tinker around with Webmaster Tools for at least a few minutes, because Google has done an excellent job of helping people further understand search. Webmaster Tools offers important site diagnostics information about when your site was last crawled, popular search terms that are driving traffic to your site, and even who is linking to you. The best part about Webmaster Tools is that Google has made it very easy for beginners to learn what all of this data means. Every section is embedded with links such as “How do I use this data?” or “More information,” and it is also very common to find the following small graphic located next to common search engine buzz words: . Hovering over this image will pop-up a small window with the definition of the word and links to read more about the topic or to see how it relates to your site. These tools are designed to help webmasters understand how to create the most search engine-friendly site possible, and they do so in a way that is easy for even beginners to fully understand…and for free!

Google originally launched the Webmaster Tools Access Provider pilot program for free with Go Daddy users in November 2007.