Dottie Hodges, Northridge Interactive, Liz Murphy, RedEngine Digital, Eric Werner, Northridge Interactive, & JoMarie Hoholik, Balance Interactive

There's not a single client we work with who doesn't want to be catapulted to the top of search engine rankings. Most clients do recognize there is "work" required to make this happen. Unfortunately, the old days of simply adding meta data to your pages or "submitting" them to search engines no longer works like a charm. (And when we say old, that's relative: we are talking ten years ago.)

Search engine optimization (SE0) is like a moody tween at best. Seemingly unpredictable, ever-changing, and sometimes hostile, the algorithms to which we bow are actually more of an evolution. That Mystical Black Box at Google contains logic that evolves daily to... you know what?

(This is shocking.)

Serve the user and the user's needs!

How dare they!

It's true. So, as you collectively develop web sites to recruit, engage, retain, and cultivate your constituents, you must ensure your content in fact meets the needs of your target audiences. In order for your site to be truly OPTIMIZED for the search engines, you'll need:

• To be free of technical issues that would hinder spidering
• A conversion-focused content approach
• Each page optimized for unique keywords with unique title tags and content
• A strong internal linking strategy
• Fresh content
• Inbound links

To be successful, however, you need to go beyond having your site be just "search engine FRIENDLY" and instead want your site to be "search engine OPTIMIZED" so that your Web pages come up on page one of a search results page for specific, relevant, and traffic-driving search phrases.

But how? 

1. KNOW THY AUDIENCES.

How can you reach target audiences if you don't explore who they are? Ultimately, you have to know enough about them to know what they're seeking -- and how they're doing so. For your issues, what keywords are people actually using? What kind of information are they seeking? Are there enough issues to make it worthwhile to apply the resources necessary to rank for those phrases? You also need to consider what our ultimate goal is for these individuals: Are you seeking to educate? Recruit? Raise money? All of the above?

If your goal is action-related (donations, email signups, actions, etc.), then look at adding a strong call to action on pages that are already ranked high for a related phrase -- or consider building a newly optimized page whose focus is completely conversion-focused. This page can in turn be used as a destination landing page for targeted pay-per-click or affinity marketing efforts. (And yes: that's another article entirely.)

Don't be afraid to get down and dirty with your data and explore how users have found you in the past. Look at competitor or partner organizations and see how they position themselves vis-a-vis keywords. Pull some metrics on your PPC keyword traffic and conversions; it changes daily and trends emerge and shift.

This might be a great opportunity to get insights from a seasoned consultant: put together the best keyword list you have and send it to someone who has had years of experience in the search engine landscape. A little bit of direction in your keyword strategy can work wonders for you over the long term and set you up for success and self-reliance.

Establishing the keywords that are important and relevant to your organization and the audiences you target is the single most important first step to serve as the strategic roadmap for your optimization efforts.

Consider these keyword research tools to help you:

• Google keyword research tool (sktool)
• Compete.com Search Analytics
• Trellian
• SpyFu.com
• SEM Rush
• Search Engines' "Related Searches" Suggestions

2. BUILD WITH SEO IN MIND

Simply put, search engines reward reinforcement of keyword concepts. Architecting your site with your most important keywords in mind as well as filling the site with content relevant to those keywords will be the critical driving factor in dramatically improving performance.

Why is this relevant? Not only does it help drive you to a site structure that will be effective for your human visitors -- one where they easily find what they're looking for because the keyword terms they're using are used throughout your site -- but it also creates a high-yield environment for computer spiders that scan sites for content. To optimize SEO performance, it is critical to have an information architecture and content set driven by keywords. This means if you're redesigning your Web site, you optimize during the build, and while you are writing content, not after.

How do you do it? Places to repeat and reinforce keywords in a natural language way:

• Page Titles
• Navigation (E.g. if your organization assists people in finding daycares, make the navigation label "Choosing a Daycare" not "Making the Decision".)
• Headlines
• Body Copy (Your content should support the keywords for the page; if it doesn't, then either the copy or the keywords need to change.)
• Alt tags for images

If you can't answer the question, "What two or three keywords are we trying to get this page to rank for?", then go back to step one. If you can answer that question, then ensure that those variations on those keywords are included in the elements listed above.

The page title holds a huge amount of weight, but the search engines consider the words furthest to the left to be most important, so put your important keywords near the beginning of your title.

Also remember that you should always think about your human visitors first, and consider what will appear compelling to them. Don't do anything in the spirit of optimization that won't be understandable, readable, and motivating to your audiences. In a perfect world, if you're doing it right, one will be a natural evolution of the other.

3. DEVELOP A CONTENT STRATEGY -- FOR OTHER WEBSITES!

Developing content to be housed on other people's websites can work wonders for your SEO campaigns. This is because one of the biggest ranking factors are inbound links from other websites -- but you don't necessarily want links from just any website. In fact, being associated with bad neighborhoods can actually be a negative.

In a perfect world, you want links from highly relevant and authoritative sites in your niche. One way to do that is to create great content and ask them if they would put it on their website with links back to you. Again, search algorithms reinforce good (and relevant!) behavior.

A few tips for external content placement and linking:

• Don't just point links to your home page
• Develop links to the deep pages of your site where the "good stuff"; (most relevant content) lives
• Match the keywords you are targeting with anchor text for the links themselves
• Acquire links from diverse sources

Bonus Tip: Find out who is linking to you and get in touch. Sometimes you can ask them to point more links to your site or to change the anchor text to something that is even more targeted. If it is an image link, then ask them to make the alt text include your target keyword.

4. KEEP IT GOING

All of this work is not to be performed once and then put on a shelf to gather dust. You have to keep at it or your performance will wither on the vine along with your efforts.

Continued development of fresh and relevant content as well as modification of titles and other on-page factors should adjust for changes in your strategy as your program work -- and the online landscape -- evolves over time. Continue to look at referring traffic from important search phrases to see how things are evolving on a monthly basis. Look at your web analytics reports to find out what keywords are resulting in people taking the kinds of actions you want them to take on the website.

There are more than 31 wonderful flavors of effort for how to execute and manage SEO: self-taught, self-executed, sole reliance upon vendor, some combination thereof, initial engagement with self-reliance for maintenance, and every combination of these under the sun. Regardless of your particular organization's scope of effort, you can accomplish great things by expending a little effort up front to get a strong strategic direction and paint an effective keyword landscape. Then the execution of that direction can scale according to your internal and external resources over time.

Happy optimization!