Practical Ways Your Association Can Leverage SEO

By Michael Teitelbaum

Association and not-for-profit executives are quite familiar with the power of the web in helping them find, get, and keep members and donors online. Almost every not-for-profit has an attractive website that provides solid, well-organized information and useful tools to its visitors. However, getting the right people to the website is a puzzle most associations and other businesses, for that matter are still trying to solve.

That's where Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, comes in. SEO refers to the process of structuring and creating content to help your website appear as highly as possible in all relevant natural keyword search results. When done well and with a little patience, SEO can drive a high amount of targeted traffic to your website without the need to spend a dime on paid search listings. While SEO is often seen as a black science to the technologically challenged among us, there are some effective steps your association can take to leverage keywords and optimize your site for search engines. Here are five little-known ways your association or not-for-profit can create an effective SEO strategy:

Be Everything for a Few, Not a Few for Everything
It is a common misconception that SEO simply involves throwing keywords against the digital wall to see what sticks. In reality, this tactic could hamper your site's SEO effectiveness or, even worse, get it flagged by the major search engines as a purveyor of keyword spam, which will make your website virtually invisible to search engines. Ugh, you definitely do not want that to happen.

Rather than stuff your website full of loosely related keywords in an attempt to grab as many eyeballs as possible, pay close attention to the keywords and search terms that truly reflect your site's content. Consider the terms that describe your organization's mission, industry or profession, area of focus, geographic location, range of services, and corporate clientele (if applicable).

Put yourself at the keyboards of the audience you are trying to reach; this perspective will help you develop keywords that are truly relevant and viable. Most of the major search engines, including Google and Yahoo!, have tools that allow you to test drive specific keywords to see what kind of traffic they generate.

SEO Top Three: Focus, Density, Prominence
Before you dive into creating new website content, take a moment to consider what search engines look for as they crawl through a website. There are three factors-keyword focus, density, and prominence-that the major search engines use to determine if the content of a web page is deemed relevant to a particular search query.

Focus refers to the overall topics and themes of your website content. Every page should include content and keywords that are focused on a few targeted topics that are relevant to your members or donors. Pages that have no clear focus will be ignored by search engines.

Density is a formula for optimizing how frequently your keywords appear in your copy relative to the length of the page's content. Although there are no magic numbers to aim for, content for each targeted page should be no less than 300 to 400 words with a keyword density around four to five percent. If it gets much denser, the search engines will know you're trying to trick them by padding your web page with keywords.

The prominence of your keywords is another clear indication to search engines that these terms best reflect the content of your site. Keywords that appear in headlines, subheads and at the beginning of paragraphs indicate that the rest of the page content is relevant to these terms.

Structure Web Page Content for Easy Search
In addition to the SEO top three, the structure of your web page content factors heavily into how relevant and important it appears to search engines. As you set out to write copy for each page, pay close attention to the placement and format of your keywords:

• Include your designated keywords in every paragraph of the page's content, and repeat them as often as seems reasonable (don't forget about keyword density.).
• Use both singular and plural forms of your keywords to increase their visibility to search queries.
• Whenever possible, begin each paragraph with a subhead that includes a keyword.
• Use your keywords as links to other pages of your site.

Although SEO content strategies yield longer web pages with a lot of words, this structure will make them easier to read. That's important if you want new visitors to, you know, actually stick around and read something once they've clicked to your website!

Lose the Jargon; Keep the Visitors
One of the hardest aspects of writing for SEO is generating copy that is both intelligible and search engine friendly. Remember that your website does you no good if your visitors cannot understand what you're saying; they'll simply get frustrated and leave.

If your association is in an industry or profession that's chock-full of jargon or insider language, minimize its use in your website text. Instead, gear your keywords and page copy toward uninformed readers who may only have a rudimentary understanding of what you do or who you serve.

If you truly believe that insider terms are a necessary SEO strategy for your member or donor base, consider creating landing pages that specifically address these visitors. These pages can be buried in your website's navigation-yet still visible to search engines, ensuring that only visitors who search for these proprietary terms will reach these pages without scaring off the rest of us.

Frequent Updates Keep Rankings High
Search engines are smart; they can tell when a website hasn't been updated in a while. Those that appear stale are dropped lower in search result rankings, which means even a well-planned website can lose search engine steam. For that reason, regular website content updates should be a key part of your SEO strategy.

There are several ways to keep your website content fresh. The easiest is to repurpose content you are already creating, such as a monthly member e-newsletter. This content can be doubly effective, as it is often full of relevant keywords. If member or donor education is a core aspect of your organization's mission, case studies or white papers make great search engine-friendly content. One important tip: Make sure all text is in HTML format, as search engine crawlers cannot read through PDF or image files.

If writing a newsletter, case study or white paper seems a little daunting, consider adding a page or two to your website that will include association updates, industry news, or member profiles. Even brief snippets will keep your website up to date (good for search engines) while appearing relevant to new and repeat visitors.

A word of warning: Updating your website too frequently can actually be detrimental to your SEO efforts. Search engines need time to locate and index your new content; too many changes in too short a time period can raise virtual red flags. If possible, limit very frequent (think daily or every other day) changes to only a page or two of your site, such as one dedicated to latest news, and link to it from your homepage. Such a strategy strikes the right balance between frequent updates that please users without rocking the boat for search engines.

Bonus Tip: Be Patient!
One of the most common misconceptions about SEO is that it will work as soon as you publish your newly optimized pages. In reality, it can take months before SEO helps your website move the needle and start generating an increase in targeted traffic. Once you have implemented the above suggestions to optimize your content, be patient and give search engines some time to crawl through your site, index the pages, and make them as visible as possible to relevant search queries.

If you have the time and the patience required, SEO strategies are an effective way to maximize your website's visibility to prospective members and donors searching the web. For organizations on a tight budget, there may be no bigger bang for your Internet marketing buck.