SEO Introduction

The benefits of a respectable Internet presence are immense and well-documented. What is less well-known is how easily nonprofit organizations can increase their visibility on the major search engines.
The majority of online searches take place on the three big search engines: Google, Yahoo, and MSN, with Google controlling most of the current market. There are two types of results which show up when a user performs a search in one of these engines: sponsored listings (for which there is a cost) and organic results. We will focus on achieving organic results.
Organic results are links to sites that the search engine has dynamically, and seemingly magically, ranked as being most relevant to any particular keyword or phrase. Unlike sponsored listings, you are not charged by the search engine if someone clicks your link as the result of an organic search. The higher your website is on the list of organic search results for your keywords, the more visitors your site is likely to get.
This guide will explain the basic steps of how to get your site to show up higher in the search results of major search engines, preferably within the first page of listings. To be effective, your campaign should focus on getting visibility for the specific terms that most closely relate to your work. We will cover five elements in achieving this objective:

1. Keyword Research
2. Website Optimization
3. Link Building For Nonprofits
4. Keeping Content Fresh
5. Analytics

Your website’s traffic will grow as you add more content to your site and follow the optimization steps in this guide. However, a good search engine ranking can never be guaranteed, and your position in the search engine results will fluctuate and be influenced by several factors, including other websites competing for similar search terms.