SEO best practice for your charity’s website

Optimising your charity’s website for the search engines (or SEO) is crucial – if people can’t find your website then you have zero chance of getting them to donate or volunteer!

Getting your site to rise quickly through the search engine ranks is a huge area of study and a full time job for many, but it is possible to at least make sure that your website stays in line with search engine guidelines and avoids penalties. Here are some tips to help you with that. Most of them don’t take any technical knowledge, and I’ve tried to keep the more techy ones simple. There’s a lot more you can do if you employ an SEO professional, but hopefully this will get you off to a good start:

1. Create Quality Content: Share original, valuable content that aligns with the charity’s mission and audience. Don’t just copy content from other sites. Case studies and real life stories are excellent ways to do this, or making sure you keep on top of adding upcoming events or photos of past events.
2. Use Keywords Wisely: Incorporate keywords naturally, without overdoing it. Ensure they match the content and meet the needs of your audience. Don’t believe anyone who tells you that the more keywords you get in the better, or, even worse, to use the alt text on your images to add keywords. This is called “keyword stuffing” and will quickly get you penalised. Write for your audience, not the search engines.
3. Optimize for Mobile: Over 60% of web surfing is now done on mobile devices so it’s crucial to ge this bit right. Make sure the website looks great on mobile and tablets as well as the bigger screens on laptops and desktops. If it doesn’t look right on a mobile you’ll get penalised, and you’ll irritate most of your visitors! If you do notice any problems, go back to your web designer and get them fixed.
4. Speed Up the Website: Getting this right is mostly a techy job, but you can improve loading times yourself by making sure that your images are the right size. And by that I mean file size, not the width or height. The easiest way to do this is to use a free online compressing tool – there are loads, just do a quick search. Other things that can help are using a good web host with fast server load times, reducing code bloat, and enabling browser caching.
5. Secure the Site: Use HTTPS to protect user data and build trust, as this is one of the key ranking points for search engines – if your site doesn’t have an SSL certificate (that’s the thing that gives it the https status) your ranking will tank. Again, this a bit techy, but if you don’t have a web developer to sort this for you just ask your web host to sort it out. And if they tell you that you need to pay for the SSL certificate, then find a new host – they should be free.
6. Avoid Bad SEO Practices: Stay away from tactics like showing different content to search engines and users (cloaking), using hidden text, or engaging in link schemes.
7. Build Quality Backlinks: Earn links from trusted, reputable sites instead of buying them or joining link farms. Don’t fall prey to those unsolicited emails that tell you they can get you to a number 1 position as this is almost always done by them adding hundreds of bad quality back links. It might fool Google for a second or two, but once you’re caught out your ranking will plummet.
8. Enhance User Experience: Focus on making the site easy to navigate with clear calls to action and a logical structure. And make it accessible – you get extra points for that!
9. Keep Content Updated: Regularly refresh content to show that the site is active and relevant.
10. Stick to Search Engine Rules: Regularly check and follow the webmaster guidelines from major search engines like Google and Bing.

By following these steps, a charity can keep its website in good standing with search engines, helping it reach more people and support its mission effectively.