Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a term that everyone uses these days, but many people in the nonprofit sector don’t know what it means. There are many SEO experts who claim that they can get your site to the top of the rankings, but sometimes the results are not confirmed. Having basic knowledge about SEO can be of great help to you as the CEO of an organization.
As much as you trust your tech people, SEO is something every leader can and should know.
What is SEO?
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is easy to understand conceptually. SEO is the process of drawing attention to your website through organic (ie, non-paid) and editorial (ie, a blog on your site) content. To get traffic to your site, you have to appear high, preferably on the first page, in the rankings of search engines like Google, Yahoo or Bing.
Search engines continually change their digital algorithms that affect rankings. It is made so that the quality of what people see is high. In other words, search engines value high-quality content and don’t want end users to get spam-filled results. And you don’t want your content to be marked as created for search engines, and not for humans, filled with keywords, for example, or pages with unrelated content.
Why is SEO important?
Providing content for humans and the human experience is what search engines want on the internet. And, as humans, we don’t want to read articles and visit sites with bad grammar, misspellings, and irrelevant or inconsistent information.
Ensuring good SEO, or “white hat” which means content that offers quality for humans and adheres to search engine rules and guidelines, is essential to ranking high. Google’s digital “bots” or “spiders” continually search the internet to make sure the best sites and pages rank at the top of any search. They are also indexing content and websites. Spiders crawl the Internet and index it in the “directory” of Google, Yahoo or Bing. That indexing makes the most relevant and high-quality results appear when someone performs a search.
How can I improve the SEO of my site?
There are a few ways to ensure that your organization’s website or blog is search engine optimized.
- Your site and its content must be mobile-ready. If your site hasn’t been designed for mobile yet, you might want to do that right now.
- With search engines and social media platforms increasingly relying on images, you should have certain videos and photos accompany your copy.
- The digital age is all about sharing. Improving your SEO rankings is helped by having engaging content that people want to: a) read; and, b) share. Integrate plugins and sharing buttons on the website.
- Believe it or not, the security of your site affects your search engine rankings. Make sure your site is using Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS). The HTTPS protocol protects data between a visitor to your site over the Internet and your website.
Finally, if you’re looking for SEO success, there are two metrics you want to use to help you measure success:
- You want to see your website appear high in the first page rankings of the most popular search engines, especially Google.
- You want high conversion rates for your website. If people don’t buy what you’re selling or don’t sign up, you have a deeper problem than SEO.
Understanding these essential aspects of search engine optimization will go a long way in ensuring that you and your support team communicate with the same understanding of SEO. And this basic knowledge will help your nonprofit or social business website or blog achieve digital success.