Chris Anders - Internet Strategy Consultant

Search Engine Optimisation, commonly referred to as SEO, is a series of strategies for writing the content for and coding your website together with other "off-site factors" that help people doing searches find your site online.

The ultimate goal is for a particular search term that your site appears towards the top of the search results, and ideally number 1, when people do a search. This can have dramatic effects - see http://www.redcardinal.ie/search-engine-optimisation/12-08-2006/clickthrough-analysis-of-aol-datatgz/ for some stats.

With endless forums on SEO strategy and a thousand and one factors listed, for a smaller organisation SEO can be overwhelming! Getting to number 1 in the search results can be difficult and you need to be realistic about the search term or phrase that you are targetting. It is very important however that you have some understanding of the factors involved - if not you may actually inhibit people finding you altogether!

If you are just launching a new site or have limited resources perhaps the best advice is "first do no harm". The following 8 guidelines are the most important things to consider - whilst they may not move you up to #1 they will at least be able to help people find your site and help lay a foundation which you can build upon at a later date. Each of these items will be expanded upon in later blog articles.

1. Have an overall web strategy - be clear about your objectives and who your audience is. Is your website primarily a vehicle for fundraising - if so who is likely to give to you e.g. Trusts, high net worth individuals, people with a particular interest or general members of the public? Smaller charities typically have a range of people they want to attract to their site that may include attracting beneficiaries, individual donors and trusts etc. Your website may even be part of your service delivery in e.g. informing people about a particular medical condition etc.

2. Do detailed keyword research. Put yourself into each of your audiences shoes - if you were seeking help or wishing to make a donation to a specific cause what sort of searches might you make to find an organisation offering the services you do? For example someone seeking help is likely to search for your site in a very different way to someone that e.g. wants to do a sponsored charity run or a professional grant giving organisation doing its own research.

Whatever you do DON'T just guess at a list of keywords then implement them on your site. (The process of generating keywords and testing them will be discussed at a later date). The objective of this exercise is to come up with a list of keywords:

- that people search for in sufficient frequency,
- that are relevant and specific enough to your organisation and what you do and that
- take into account the competition from other sites.

For example many cancer charities might think about targetting the word "cancer" - if you are a small charity, are not Cancer Research UK, not planning an enormous website full of useful resources resources and don't have a huge budget then think again... There are hundreds of other charities that are cancer related as well as literally millions of other sites about cancer on the web.

For people to continue using Google it has to be seen to deliver relevant results. Is your site likely to be the most relevant or useful site for "cancer" on the internet? Unless your site is going to be truly spectacular and you have an equally spectacular budget to promote it you are not going to make #1 in the search results!

Instead you need to identify a search phrase that distinguishes your charity from others - e.g. are your services offered regionally or do you work with a specific type of cancer? Improved keywords to target in the latter cases might be e.g. "cancer nottingham" or "oesophageal cancer". Again though even these keywords may be competing against a lot of other sites.

The secret to keyword research, which will be discussed in depth in another entry, is finding keywords that are specific enough to your organisation and website content but that are not so specific that they are hardly ever searched for - ie its all about a balancing act between potential and your competition.

A final thought on Keywords - don't choose too many! Different parts of your website can focus on different keywords but to do well you need to focus on a few key phrases - if you try and target too many you are likely to do poorly for all of them.

3. Within the coding of your website there are a number of tags - of all of these the TITLE tag is the most important and the TITLE tag on your homepage is the most important of all.

Make sure that the TITLE tag contains the most promising keyword (you identified as part of your research) and that you keep the TITLE tag short - no more than about 7 words.

Many organisations make the mistake of putting their company name in the title tag first and in many cases not only on the homepage but throughout their site. If you are a large organisation that people are very aware of and likely to search for you by name then this is fine - on the homepage at least. If not many people have heard of you however you need to have a keyword relevant to what you do - maybe (at least on the homepage) followed by your organisations name.

4. Offsite factors - to do well in Google you need to increase your page rank (you can monitor this if you have downloaded the Google Toolbar).

Page rank is essentially derived from the number and the "quality" of links to specific pages on your website. See it as a voting system - if my lowly blog linked to your page it might be considered as one vote for your page. However if the BBC or another site that is well established, has a lot of traffic and is "trusted " linked to your page then you might get 100 votes.

There are additional votes to glean if the content of the page that links to you is relevant to content of the page it links to on your site.

Avoid paying for links on dubious looking directories - its very unlikely you will benefit from these and may just be throwing money down the drain.

There are a whole number of other issues to consider which will be discussed at a later date but the other important thing to consider is including your keywords in the links that people make to your site - e.g. in the example above if your organisation was called "Smithson Charity" but you actually delivered cancer support services in Nottingham having links to you as "Nottingham Cancer Services" rather than "Smithson Charity" would be far more effective.

5. Again going back to code of your site - use HTML "h1" and "h2" codes to add a page heading and subheadings to your site. As for the TITLE tag its important to include keywords you are targetting within these.

6. Make sure that the content of your page includes text - and text that is relevant to the keywords you are targetting. You need to make sure that the principal keywords you target are actually contained within the content of the webpage that you are optimising. If you use FLASH (for animation etc) be aware that this isn't currently indexed so won't help

7. Develop relevant and useful content that people are likely to read and that doesn't make them immediately hit the back button. If you write useful and interesting content its more likely that people will link to you - although not clear some research suggests that bounce rates (where people click through to your site then immediately leave) may have a negative effect. Monitoring bounce rates is critical in any event as it gives an indication on how useful people are finding your site generally.

8. Make sure its easy to navigate around your site and that whoever programs your site doesn't heavily rely on scripts or other "non-text" based navigation. For larger sites make sure that you add a Google Sitemap - this is a special file written in a different programming language (XML). You can generate one automatically via http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/