One of the benefits of blogging for your company or organization’s website is the potential increase of your SEO. SEO – for those who are new to the acronym – stands for Search Engine Optimization. In layman’s terms, it is a method of increasing your website or online presence rank in search engine results by using key words and phrases. You are “optimizing” your search rank in certain areas.
There are many companies that specialize in increasing a company or organization’s SEO. I could list a hundred, but a few I work with and read the blogs of include:
- Covario – fka NetConcepts (A client)
- TopRank Online Marketing (Headed by a friend, Lee Odden)
- Outspoken Media (A blog that everyone should be reading, written by Lisa Barone)
My list is endless but there there are quite a few more that I trust will do well in addition to the aforementioned companies.
The job of an SEO company is to make sure that your properties – be it a website, a blog, an ecommerce site or any other assets you have – are ranked high on a search engine results page (aka SERP). If they are doing their job correctly, you should be ranked high on a SERP when someone is looking for your company, product or service. In the case of a nonprofit or cause, you want to make it easier for a donor or volunteer or that millionaire philanthropist to find you in Google. With all of that said, I have never hired an SEO company yet do well in search results. My secret? I started a blog.
When I began blogging back in early 2004, I had no idea what SEO was and I certainly had no idea how to make my blog or online assets rank high in the search engines. I accidentally ran across the result one day while performing a vanity search on my blog name. I typed in the word “Genuine” just to see what came up (go ahead I’ll wait). Lo and behold, there was my site (Captain Genuine blog), ranked number 1 above all the other results. The interesting thing was I was ranked higher than a scooter company of the same name, a software company of the same name and a little company in the Northwest part of the United States that sold Genuine Advantage Software. That to me seemed pretty powerful. Companies pay big money for that sort of ranking, and here I was a nobody Daddy blogger with no budget ranked number 1. Since that time I have not been updating that blog much and the rank has fallen, but you get the idea.
All I did to get that ranking was to start a blog, and use the term “Genuine” in my categories, in my titles of posts, and of course in my content. You will hear the mantra “content is king” from many of the SEO companies as this is what they use to have the search engines crawl your site. As a nonprofit or cause you, too, can get a higher rank in the search engines just by starting a blog and using key words and phrases as I did. My budget for SEO? Zero. Of course it did take time and effort to update the blog and make it presentable for people to read and for people to link to, which I will talk about in another post. But for the most part, it worked without costing much money. As a nonprofit you are constantly weighing options of costs and benefits. Considering how important it is to be found by those who are searching through the thousands of charitable organizations online, you can’t afford not to start a blog. Keep that in mind when thinking of tactics to implement a social media plan.
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Tags: blogging, community, nonprofit blogging, SEO, social media
