Search engines use a secret algorithm, a set of rule-based actions, to determine the most relevant webpages (or other content) to return in response to a search query. Generally, the higher you rank in the search results for these terms, the more traffic you’ll attract to your website.

Search engine optimization or SEO is about getting your website to the top ranks in search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing for specific keyword phrases related to your nonprofit’s services, events, issues, etc. In other words, the goal of SEO is to align your website with the search engine’s algorithm as best as possible in order to increase the probability of your site appearing in the search results for pertinent keyword searches. Top rankings can be accomplished by changing the structure, code, and content of your website in ways that facilitate search engines in discovering all the pages on your site and give it a clearer understanding of what your website is all about. SEO also seeks to increase the number of other sites linking to your website as this is an important factor search engines use in determining your rankings for keywords. Lastly, SEO is a long term online marketing strategy and it may take several weeks to see the payoff, but the return-on-investment can be very high. Below is an example of SEO at work for Amnesty International for the keyword “arms trade”.

SEO is designed to increase the volume and quality of organic traffic coming into your website.

The Opportunity for Nonprofits:

Search engines do not charge a fee to list your website among organic search results, so this is a great opportunity for nonprofit organizations to expand their reach online.

Many search engines incorporate images, videos, press releases, books and shopping feeds in their search results which may represent a tremendous opportunity to create an engaging user experience for your nonprofit within the search engine results.

How to get started:

1. Identify keywords that are related to your nonprofit using the Google Keyword Tool.

2. Assign a keyword to each page on your website. You will optimize the page for this keyword.

3. Add the keyword to the title tag, meta description tag, meta keyword tag, header tag, alt attributes, main site navigation, and URL to its respective allocated page when feasible, being careful not to overdo it and sacrifice user experience.

4. As best as possible, incorporate each keyword into the main body of content of its assigned webpage. The main page content should have between 300 – 500 words of copy.

5. Ask partners, donors, and members to link from their website to your nonprofit site using the keywords you selected as link text. Identify blogs, forums, and website directories and install links to your site using your keywords as link text according to any stated guidelines. In some cases, you may want to send a friendly email to the owner of related websites politely requesting a link to your site.

Are You A Nonprofit Organizations Who Wants To Know More About Internet Marketing?

The proceeding was an excerpt from A Nonprofit’s Guide to Internet Marketing: Cost-Effective Opportunities to Accelerate Online Marketing Success for Your Nonprofit.  This is my FREE 15-page guide designed to help nonprofit organizations activate or to accelerate their online marketing efforts.  Download it instantly by clicking the button below.

If you have any questions about the content of this document, please feel free to comment to this post and I reply there.  If you are looking to retain my services for any of the online marketing programs mentioned, please use this form to contact me.

Download the Internet Marketing Guide for Nonprofits in PDF format

Today, as an accompaniment to the start of New England’s GiveCamp weekend in which I will be participating, I am releasing A Nonprofit’s Guide to Internet Marketing: Cost-Effective Opportunities to Accelerate Online Marketing Success for Your Nonprofit. This is a 15-page guide designed to help nonprofit organizations activate or to accelerate their online marketing efforts. The Nonprofit’s Guide to Internet Marketing contains information about:

• Why nonprofits should consider Internet marketing and how it can help to expand membership rolls, event participation, donation collection, and to increase awareness
• A brief overview of the main disciplines within online marketing and how nonprofits cans get started, including search engine optimization (SEO), paid search marketing (pay-per-click) , and social media marketing (SMM)
• Specific programs offered by companies like Google and Flickr to assist nonprofits in marketing online
• Additional opportunities within emarketing and a brief look at how to implement each grassroots style
• Guidelines for vetting and working with online marketing agencies

The guide is totally free, but if you like it kindly donate to any of the charities that will be present at New England GiveCamp. Here’s the list of nonprofits scheduled to attend the event.

Also, if you know a nonprofit or charity that can use this guide, please feel free to share a copy of it with them or refer them to this site.

If you have any questions about the content of this document, please feel free to comment to this post and I reply there. If you are looking to retain my services for any of the online marketing programs mentioned, please use this form to contact me.

Today, I launched my own URL shortening service called xURLs

and I’m going to show you how you can easily create your own too.  But first, here’s a little background about URL shortening and why it’s an important aspect of your social media, affiliate marketing, press release, and even search engine optimization strategy.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with URL shortening, here’s a quick example of when you may want to chop a long URL down to something smaller.  Let’s say you want to post a link to a specific page on a shopping website for home office furniture in your tweet on Twitter. Unfortunately, the URL you want to include is 133 characters long which doesn’t leave space to talk about much else in your tweet.  You can reduce the length of the link by submitting it a URL shortening service which outputs a shorter URL that takes the user to the same exact page for you to use in your tweet, as in the example below:

Original URL (133 characters): http://www.thehomeofficedepot.com/shop.php?c=500&n=1069102&i=B00252CGL2&x=Cherry_Finish_Home_Office_Corner_
Workstation_Computer_Desk

New Short URL (17 characters): http://xurls.us/3

As you can see, the new URL is 116 characters shorter than the original link, resolves to the exact same pages, and is now Twitter friendly.

Lately, I have been doing a lot with Twitter and affiliate marketing.  In doing so, I’ve come to recognize the importance of “URL control” in posting links on social media networks and within my own affiliate promotional pieces.  There are many services out there that allow people to shorten URLs.  The most well known of these websites are bit.ly and TinyURL, but there are tons of others, each with its own unique features.

It occurred to me that given the relative simplicity of these services that it would be easy to set-up and host my own URL shortening/redirection services using a domain I own.  Having my own URL reduction website gives me the ability to shorten URLs, incorporate keywords of my choosing, view click statistics and user information, set my own redirection rules, and add advertising.  In other words, as a web marketer, I now have the ability to abbreviate links with custom characteristics while gaining valuable analytical insight.

Steps To Create Your Own Domain Redirection Service

What follows is a basic overview of how to get your URL shortening website up and running pretty quickly.

1.  Find the shortest available domain name you can

I’ve been using Bustaname.com to help find some very good unregistered website domain names for a while now.  It was Bustaname.com that enable me to find xURLs.us (the URL for my domain name shortening service) which is a beautifully short and descriptive 8 character (including the period) domain name.  Many URL reduction websites use exotic two-letter, top level domains (TLD) like .al, .cc, .ly.  These are great because they are shorter than the classic “.com” TLD, but they can cost you anywhere from $10 – $90 to reserve.  Please note: many of country-specific TLDs have special criteria that must be met in order to reserve them.  You can also use the little domain availability tool below to quickly check if a website name is available. 

Once you’ve settled on a short domain name, the next step is to register it.  I use 1&1 Internet for domain registration.  It’s quick, easy, and cheap.  Others may prefer www.GoDaddy.com .

2.  Get reliable hosting

Most of the URL shortening services I came across researching this project are built upon PHP and MySQL, so I’d recommend a server host that comes with these two already installed.  Again, I use 1&1 Internet for server hosting, but you should use the web host you feel most comfortable using.

3.  Select a URL shortening script

It seems to be fairly easy for experienced web programmers to write their own custom URL redirection script, but why reinvent the wheel?  There are a few dozen free URL shortening scripts out there and some paid applications for you to select from.

xURLs is built upon a simple PHP script called Yourls.  I chose Yourls as my redirection platform because it’s free, has an easy installation, a straightforward admin interface, and a decent statistics package.

The admin console for Yourls:

The stat package in Yourls:

Some other URL shortening scripts include: Kissa.be, Shorty, and TightURL.

Each script has its own mini-URL creation procedures.  For example, some present the target page in an iframe of a dynamically generated page, while others use a 301 HTTP redirect or even a Meta refresh as the mechanism to get users to the intended page.  Some scripts allow you to create multiple mini-URLs which point to a single long URL.  You should demo, research, and analyze how each script works and select the one that fits your needs.

4.  Install and customize the shortening script

Next, after you have selected a domain shortening script, you’ll need to install it in your web host environment.  You should review the installation documentation for the specific URL shortening script you selected, but for the most part they all involve roughly the same steps:  (1)create a SQL database (2)populate database connection parameters in a PHP set-up file (3)toggle settings in a configuration file (4)upload the files for the URL shortening application to your web server via FTP (5)initiate an installation/customization script.

If you’re using Yourls, you should review its installation instructions and this important note about installing Yourls on a 1&1 web server.  Also, some of you may not want your URL shortening service to be available for public use.  In this case, you will need to password protect your website.  Yourls allows you to do this quickly by changing the line “define(‘YOURLS_PRIVATE’, true);” in the config-sample.php to “true”.

As a nice little feature to get your started, Yourls includes a file called sample-public-front-page.php.txt to give you an idea about how to construct the homepage for your URL shortening website.  You can customize the contents of this file to your liking.  When you’re finished designing your homepage, change the file name to index.php and upload it to the root directory of your website.  I’d recommend designing a decent looking homepage and installing visitor tracking (i.e. Google Analytics, GoStats) for your URL reduction website – you never know when curious users may come-a-knocking.

5.  Start posting your short links

Now that your URL redirection script is up and running under your own domain, it’s time to start posting your short links on Twitter, Facebook, and your own affiliate websites.  Here’s an image of xURLs, my own URL chopping website, at work in the wild.

If you want to see something amazing, try posting a link routed through your URL shortening/redirection service in a tweet and immediately jump over to the statistics screen and watch how fast the clicks accumulate.

We all have our favorite online marketing blogs, but here are a bunch of free emarketing publications I recommend subscribing to also.  The sign-up form for some of these can get a little lengthy, buy hey, you’re getting a wealth of information and expert advice for absolutely free. Here are the no cost internet marketing magazines I’m currently receiving:

1. Website Magazine.  A must-have for online business professionals – subscribe
2. Deliver: A Magazine for Marketers. Published by the US Post Office. – subscribe
3. DMNews. A direct marketing magazine – subscribe
4. Internet Retailer. A very awesome ecommerce magazine – subscribe
5. Target Marketing.  Another direct marketing magazine – subscribe
6. All About the ROI.  Case studies, expert advice, ecommerce, etc – subscribe

Please let me know if there are other free resources out there.

When I first launched this blog way back in October of 2007, I used to check my Google Analytics, Google Adsense and Feedburner statistics excessively (even though the three services only update every 24 hours).  A little time has passed and I’ve settle into some sort of groove, so I don’t pull the metrics for my site that crazily anymore.

This week, however, as I was scanning my Google Analytics, I noticed a high volume of search traffic coming in through an article I wrote called How to Estimate The Organic CTR for Your Website in September 2006.  It was the first meaningful article I really published on this blog, and one reader was so impressed by it that they kindly submitted it to Digg.com on my behalf (BIG THANKS!).  Like any good blog-keeper, I proceeded to investigate why I was getting so much search engine referred traffic to this page.  Well… it turns out that Google ranks this particular article #1 for the phrase "Organic CTR".  All things considered, that’s quite an endorsement from the world’s busiest search engine.  Although there are a few updates I will make to How to Estimate The Organic CTR for Your Website in the future, the basic methodology still holds up despite the Yahoo Keyword Suggestion Tool being put out to pasture.

Because this post is the second most popular entry point on my site next to the homepage, I wanted get a better idea of just how well this article was ranking on Google.  To determine this, I pulled the top referring search terms for this posting from my Google Analytics and did a quick search engine ranking report to determine the article’s depth among Google’s results.  The table below summarizes my findings:

As you can see, this article ranks highly for a variety of variations and concatenations relating to the valuable terms "organic ctr".  I believe the fact that folks are using these keywords to find my blog reflect that my site is doing decent job in attracting the search marketing crowd.  In the end, I just think it’s all just pretty cool.  I plan to write an update to How to Estimate The Organic CTR for Your Website in the coming weeks.  Please stay tuned!

SEO Store Grand Opening.  Check it out!

How I Made My Millions is a neat little show I found on CNBC that profiles successful entrepreneurs. The format of the show is stale as a piece of bread long lost behind the sofa, but what won me over was the tidbits of advice each business owners shared about how to face obstacles to success head-on and the innovative strategies they employed to stand out in the market. Plus, there was the whole destruction thing. Take a look:

SSI Shredding, which I shall deftly describe as a manufacturer of big-ass shredders, was one the companies featured on the most recent episode of Millions. The entire organization is built around chopping stuff into little pieces… anything… just name it.

Now if you’re going to mince things like cars, boats, and refrigerators, then you might as well make a video library and stick it up on YouTube like SSI Shredding has done. Although, I have no evidence of this, I’m sure the following was said at some point by a SSI sales representative to a customer – “So you want a demo of what these babies can do? Just search for us on YouTube” . Now that’s YouTube marketing at its finest, folks.

On September 17, Google announced the release of Adsense Mobile. Adsense Mobile is an expansion of Google’s cash cow, Adsense, which dynamically inserts contextually relevant advertisements into webpages. With Adsense Mobile, webmasters can now serve up ads from the Google Network onto websites designed for viewing by handheld devices.

ROI Versus User Experience

My question is – and I think it’s a fair one – does this new technology really enhance the website experience for users of mobile platforms? Undoubtedly, it spells out more revenue for Google and webmasters and an expansion in the number of channels for ad buyers, but are the interests of handhelds users being served? From a ROI sense, Google has invested heavily in industry-leading technology and widgets to make mobile web browsing readily assessable, largely in the form of Google Mobile, Google SMS, and other free services. And let’s not forget about the shiny new iPhone that includes built-in search on Google.com and Google Maps – so I understand the business intention of Adsense Mobile.

In Google’s guidelines for advertisers who buy onto the Google network, as well as in the policies for webmasters that publish ads, there is an overarching theme of avoiding things that dampen the user experience. To Google’s credit, no more than 2 ads can be displayed on any mobile page and for now the ads appear to be only available in text, which hopefully will be effective in reducing the obtrusiveness factor often associated with internet advertising. Even with this precaution, I predict the ad annoyance will be 10x greater in a miniaturized mobile browser, than on a laptop screen or PC sized monitor.

Let’s Avoid “Spobile Sites” (spam + mobile website)

My fear is that given the dominance of Google’s advertising network, mobile users will be deterred as site after site deploys Adsense Mobile until there is simply too much ad congestion to make using portable devices efficient, resulting in a smaller mobile web user population. Or even worse, Adsense Mobile blasts the door wide open for less user-minded advertising networks to enter into the mobile advertising space. Think giant image ads and annoying multimedia banners dominating your tiny PDA screen. Although the number of mobile Internet users is escalating rapidly, handheld computing is still in its infancy, and I am weary that the aggressive tactics of less scrupulous ad networks will easily out pace the technological capabilities of most devices currently in use, thereby slowing the mobile web to a crawl.

Real Estate On A PDA Screen Is Scarce

My PDA has a diagonal screen size of 3.5 inches and is on the larger side for the new breed of intelligent Internet-enabled phones. However, too often, I can barely read the content on a website specifically designed for a mobile browser – don’t fault me for not wanting to see an ad in there when I finally do all my squinting. Navigation on any smart phone, including the iPhone, can be arduous and tedious – do I really want to waste precious load time by clicking on a Google ad by mistake? Suppose I genuinely clicked on a mobile ad, will the conversion form be specifically optimized for users on a mobile device? Keystrokes on a tiny keyboard are as valuable as screen space – will advertisers create little short cuts to help me complete the form quickly?

Last Words

I have my concerns, but for right now I just want to sit back and see how this plays out until I get an idea of the consensuses from the perspectives of advertisers, webmasters, and site visitors.

As a frequent user of internet radio, I have grown used to the abundance of ads and Flash banners placed on jukebox sites. Afterall, music sites endure hefty licensing cost to stream our favorite tunes legally and, similar to traditional radio, selling advertising space is the most prolific way to recoup for broadcasting expenditures. Like most of you, I’ve developed a blindness for those ridiculously simple “participation required” Flash games (that litter myspace) and I regularly neglect to collect my prize for being the 100th visitor to a website. But recently, I spotted a Flash game on Blogmusik.net (now called Deezer.com) that was just down right offensive, and at the very least passively racist.

The Flash game encouraged players to “Shoot the rapper” by aiming a camera at a character that looks very much like hiphopper 50 Cent walking down on a red carpet. What’s going on here is that the publisher of the STR, Traffix Inc., is trying to capitalize on the popular image of hiphop as a violent art form. Moreover, did anyone stop to think about the offensiveness of the ad dynamics? – the rapper is black, the photographer is white, and the view finder of the camera just happens to resemble the cross-hairs of a snipper riffle – or was that the real joke all along? While the makers of this game may think encouraging players to “shoot the rapper” is a clever pun, I must remind Traffix that enough violence has ravished hiphop and that real people have died. Also, Traffix the goal of your media is to drive traffic and leads for your client sites, not ostracize their hiphop culture influenced visitor base. This game is just deplorable on some many levels.

I heard 50 cents filed a lawsuit against Traffix for using his likeness without permission.