Do you wonder how your competitors have thousands of supporters and followers online and you don’t? There are a few simple ways you can increase your follower-base. Let’s keep in mind that the vast majority of searches on a search engine occur through Google.
Website Page Titles & Keywords
Your page titles should reflect the content on those pages. You should also have keywords that would be found by humans. Due to the practice of “keyword stuffing” where some organizations simply placed keywords throughout their websites – often making no sense, Google has changes its algorithms. It’s important to still use keywords, but it’s imperative that whatever copy you write be geared toward human readers. Sprinkle some keywords toward the top of your pages – using synonyms – but never stuff your pages with keywords. The Google “crawlers” are so sophisticated they can pick up on this type of activity.
Develop Regular High-Quality Content
More people have mobile devices than they do laptops or computers. Think about yourself for a moment. I bet when you’re searching for something, you probably pick up your cell phone and do a quick tap into an app. Although Google is by far the most dominant search engine, the world has changed in how it looks for information. People may search Twitter to see breaking news. They may debate something with their friends on Facebook. One of the best ways to get Google to notice you is to develop high quality content and get it out on platforms in addition to your website. All of this gets picked up by the search engines (including Google) and helps you boost your presence in the rankings. Across all of my social enterprises and businesses, our team is putting out content (others and our own) every single day.
Images on Your Website
Search engines cannot “see” photos on websites, but it’s still important to use images. Name your photos with keywords that are relevant to you so those keywords are picked up by the search engines. Additionally, insert “alt text” into your code and text descriptions of your photos. Click here to learn more about alt text. These simple strategies around images will help the search engines find you, especially Google.
Mobile
I still see nonprofits that are not optimized for mobile. This is a big mistake. More than half the searches that occur on the Internet happen on a mobile device. When a website has responsive design, it means that the user experience is seamless from computer to tablet to mobile phone. In addition, URL and HTML codes are consistent from device to design, hence making it easier to find your organization. If your site is responsive, it means if someone searches for your organization on their cell phone, they’ll be easily able to share your content.
Backlinks
When you’re developing your content you want to create backlinks to your site. Google algorithms are constantly evaluating how people get to your site. So, let’s say you posted a blog post on Facebook. When someone clicks on that link in Facebook and ends up at your site, Google is aggregating that information. What ultimately happens is that the more people get to your website from places such as Facebook, the higher in the rankings your nonprofit goes.
Finally, I want to say one quick thing about Google. It’s powerful and a lot of what is done for digital marketing is done with Google in mind. There’s a reason for that. In case you’re ever interested, you can click here to see the searches happening – live – in Google on any given day. At the time I was writing this article, over 1.7 billion searches had been completed for the day. It’s used for over 3.5 billion search a day, which translates into 1.2 trillion searches per year.
Author of “Not Your Father’s Charity: How to DOMINATE YOUR Fundraising to Create YOUR Success” (Free Digital Download)
© 2016 Wayne Elsey and Not Your Father’s Charity. All Rights Reserved.
