Recording: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAGFO4rShpo Search Engine Optimization and Marketing represent a huge opportunity for non-profits to reach their audience. Analytics offers you the business intelligence edge needed to compete and discover what your audience is doing. But where to begin? Mark Farmer guides you through the maze of reports, segments, tools and data, to get you started with SEO & SEM, reach the people you need to reach, and tap your website for critical market intelligence in order to grow online.

1. Nov 10, 2010
SEO, SEM and Analytics
for NonProfits

2. For the best webinar experience, close all other applications.
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3. CanadaHelps.org
What is CanadaHelps?
A public charitable foundation that provides accessible and
affordable online technology to both donors and charities.
For Charities
A cost-effective means of raising funds online.
For Donors
A one-stop-shop for giving.
CanadaHelps is a charity helping charities.

4. Today’s Presenter
Mark Farmer
Founder & Chief Webhead

5. Me Me Me.

6. Brands Ahoy

7. My Modus Operandi: info-bombing
• Hang onto your hats.
• My information is the bomb.

8. What is SEO
• SEO = “Search Engine Optimization.”
• Search Engine Optimization =
Google/Yahoo/Bing juice.
• SEO NOT = Online Marketing.
• SEM = “Search Engine Marketing.”
• Search Engine Marketing =
Online advertising.
• SMO = Social Media Optimization.
• SMO = the new SEO?

9. What’s in it for you: SEO
• SEO gets you noticed.
• The higher up you appear in Search
Engine Results, the more likely people
are to click on your site.
• Unless you occupy a top spot for the
search terms that are key to your
business or organization, you might
find someone else has:
– Barrick Gold
– Protestbarrick.net

10. What’s in it for you: SEO
• The criteria that make it easier for search
engines to discover your site are often
the ones that make it easier for humans
to use it, too.

11. What’s in it for you: SEM
• Online advertising can be FREE.
• Great way to crack open a market, and
to create awareness.

12. What’s in it for you: Analytics
• In a sea of arbitrary ways to measure
success, it’s the least arbitrary &
most impactful – people vote with
their clicks.
• Analytics: the intelligence that lets
you know what you’re doing well and
what needs improvement.
• Helps you discover the hidden interactions happening
every day on your website, the ‘untold stories’.

13. All hail the mighty Goog
• Not because it’s the only
game in town but because
it’s the biggest and
best-known.
• This makes it the easiest entré for beginners.
• It also happens to be the one I know best, and
the one I see the most non-profits using.

14. SEO is dead. Long live SEO!
• Reports of the demise of SEO are greatly exaggerated.
• Social media are not rendering search engines extinct any
time soon.
• In fact, search engines index social
media content now, including blogs,
Twitter, Facebook and more.
• At least one recent study has
shown that people ascribe the
same degree (or more) of trust
and authority to search engines as
they do to friends or other social
media sources.

15. Benefits of SEO
• Many SEO methods and practices apply
equally to SEO, SMO and site best
practices & accessibility.
• Spider, man.
– DONATE
• SMO.
• Best practices.

16. So how do I SEO?
• Three philosophies:
– Best Practices
– Content
– Tweaks

17. Best Practices
• Always a good idea.
• A plethora of best practices, but if you
become obsessed with them, they start
turning into tweaks.
• Some top-level highlights....

18. Best Practices
• Navigation:
– Simple, consistent, intuitive navigation that
uses text links.
• If you use graphical navigation, mirror that
navigation at the bottom of your page, using
text links.
– Internal links & anchors (but don’t go overboard).
– Site map: XML for Google, HTML for people.
– Hierarchical, structured content.

19. Best Practices
• Alternate descriptors:
– Alt tags.
– Long descriptions.
– Text for flash content.
• Meta tags:
– Not nearly as important as they used to be, and
more valuable for Bing or Yahoo, but still worth paying attention to.
• Inbound links:
– The more people who like you, and the more
important they are, the more the Goog will like you, too.
– So make friends & post content that links back to you.

20. Best Practices
• Don’ts:
– Text as image.
– Flash as navigational or structural element.
– Invisible / deliberately tiny text.
– Frames.
– Redirects.

21. Even Better
• Content is king

22. Be Like The Donald©
• Unique
• Rich
• Engaging
• (Controversial?)

23. Produce
• Lots of content.
• Fresh content.
• Lots of fresh content even better!
– Blogging
– CMS
– User-generated
– Tagging

24. Keywords
• Identify keywords that reflect
what your organizations does
and what defines you as an
organization.
• Incorporate these keywords in
your copy and your ads.
• This creates a consistency that underpins your SEO,
SEM and more. They make you more discoverable.
• More consistent for readers, too.

25. Keywords...?
• But how much is enough?
• They’re not a shortcut to SEO –
they’re a part of it.
• Don’t be robotic.
• And all Google has to do is revise
their algorithms, or have someone outbid you and your
careful plans start to unravel.
• So yes, absolutely use keywords on your site,
but don’t make them your sole focus.

26. Tweaks
• This raises a larger issue: when do
best practices become tweaks?
• When they become a substitute for
substance, for what’s really valuable
on your site.
• Keywords (like any component) are important, but
they’re not a shortcut – they’re a part of a larger content
strategy.
• So yes, pay attention to things like keywords, anchor
text, backlinks, etc. – but don’t obsess about them.

27. Beware the snake oil salesman
• You don’t get something for
nothing.
• Some people can take shortcuts,
or fake out the search engines,
but their tactics quickly get
discovered and outmanoeuvred
by the people programming search engines.
• Furthermore, search engines can and will punish you if
they feel you’re gaming their system. You can be
completely de-listed for a period of time.

28. Avoid the black hat
• The Goog is powerful. The Goog is always one step ahead
of you:
– Link farming
– Endlessly re-purposed / duplicated content
– Cloaking
– Doorway pages
– Other schemes

29. Analytics

30. SEO & Analytics = Business Intelligence
• If you can track what visitors to
your site are doing, you can
optimize their experience on the
site, how they find your site, and
what they do once they reach it.
• For an e-commerce site, this means
$ in the bank.
• For non-profits, this also means $ in the bank
(via sponsorships & other opportunities).
• It also means a chance to promote greater engagement
with your audience.

31. Analytics
• If you aren’t tracking visitors to your
site, START.
• It doesn’t matter which software you
use, but as non-profits the obvious
option is the free one, Google
Analytics.
• Why is it so important to track visitors?
– Everyone says they know their audience really well.
– Most organizations don’t know their audience nearly
as well as they think.
– They’re not perfect, but site statistics don’t have an agenda,
and they’re brutally frank.

32. Out of the box

33. Intelligence Alerts

34. Old Faithful

35. Cool Shoes

36. Gettin’ Geographic

37. Goals & More

38. Advanced Segments

39. Advanced Segments

40. Visualizations
• Motion Chart
• Geo Map
• Word Cloud, etc.
• http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/documentation/
gadgetgallery.html

41. Other Cool Analytics Stuff
• Custom reports:
– Share with others.
• Multiple accounts.
• Share advanced segments among different people.
• Filters:
– Traffic: location, language, etc.

42. Caveats
• You get what you pay for
• Inaccuracies.
• Especially when doing
historical comparisons, regardless of whether it’s
short-term.
• Don’t run reports for the sake of comparing one month to
the next.

43. SEM

44. SEM
• Advertising is just for the big guys -
I don’t need ads! I can’t afford ads!
– Google provides free advertising for non-profits
– Can be a precise, cheap way for you to advertise
• You only pay for clicks, not for impressions (unless
you want to).
• You can control where, when and to whom your ad
shows.
• You can see in real time how much it’s costing you,
how effective it is, and more.
• You can tweak and improve it in real time.

45. The Auction
• I want an ad to come up when someone searches for
“web design.”
• I’ll bid $1.25 for my ad to come up on the
search results page in Google for the
search term “web design.”
• Designer A bids $1.50, and designer B
bids $1.15.
• Designer A wins top spot. I get the 2nd
spot, and designer B gets the third spot.

46. The Auction
• “Quality Score”
• Relevance of the landing page.
• Quality of your site.
• Historical CTR of the keyword in
question.
• Relevance of the keyword to the ad.
• Etc.
• Watch out: what Google estimates your
required bid will be for an ad/keyword
may be very different from reality

47. Niiiiiice Google.
• Google will automatically discount your ads to the
minimum amount required to achieve your desired
placement.
• So if you specify a maximum bid of $1.75, but you only
need to bid $1.50 to achieve top spot, Google will only
charge you $1.50.

48. Keywords: The Return!
• Review keywords being used
on-site in search.
• Research the competition.
• Use your own intelligence.
• Use the Google keywords traffic
estimator.
• Close your eyes & take your best bet.
• Keep what works. Rinse, repeat.

49. The long tail
• You’ll hear people say that “long tail” ads are a shortcut to
cheap clicks.
• “Long tail:” the more words in a search term, and the more
obscure the words, the fewer people there are bidding for
ads for that combination.
• The fewer people bidding for them,
the cheaper they are for you to take
advantage of.

50. Beware the long tail....
• Unfortunately, they’re cheaper because there fewer people
are searching for them in Google, which means fewer clicks
for you.
• Also, the more words and the more obscure the words, the
less likely it is that there are good match for your business.
• So “Backyard Wooden Composters in
Toronto” may be more specific and
cheaper than “Toronto Composters,”
but it may only get a few hundred
clicks a month.

51. Other advertising considerations
• Enter location information when setting up your account.
• Negative keywords – filter out the noise.
• Dynamic keywords insertion: get notice.
• A/B testing.
• Google Instant.

52. Contact me
• E-mail: markfarmer@webness.biz
• Website: webness.biz
• Blog: webheresies.com
• Twitter: markus64
• Facebook: markus64

53. ABOUT MYCHARITYCONNECTS

54. Free online resources
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“Everything Old Is New Again”
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NOVEMBER 24
2PM – 3PM
(Eastern Time)
www.mycharityconnects.org

55. Question and Answer
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56. Thank you for attending!
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