Drupal

(Important Note:  For those who feel they aren't "techies", please do not be intimidated by the length of the post or the code included.  There is no coding required...this is all copy & paste.  The effort required to ensure your donation button and other calls-to-action are optimized is so overwhelmingly worth it, I strongly encourage you to give this a serious read!)

I'm keeping it simple today...and giving you a chance to get your nonprofit website a little higher in those search engine rankings, by sharing four simple SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tips that you can try right now.

Let's dive in.

1.  Make sure your website has Google Analytics installed.

Steps to take if you aren't sure: 

Given the amount of time I spend using various tools to develop different bits of content, I thought I would share a list of the tools I use the most often.  Some of these tools are free, open source solutions or services...others might be "freemium" or require some sort of payment.  Feel free to get in touch if you want some free and/or open source suggestions to the paid services or software.

1.  No coding? No problem!  A website CMS (Content Management System) allows you to easily create and manage the different types of content you have on your website.

(Be patient...HD version of video is a bit of a slow load/big file...sorry!)

In yesterday's blog I wrote about how you can get some very strategic analytics results to improve your nonprofit website home page...in under 5 minutes.

(This exercise is going to be super easy...so do it in "real time" while you are reading this.  If you don't have a Google Analytics account yet, you will need to sign up for a free one....which you can do here.  Once you have your Analytics account, you need to install the tracking code...and when that has collected data for several days, come back and give this blog a read.)

Inbound marketing, calls-to-action, engagement, A/B testing...these are all terms that I find incredibly powerful and brimming with potential.  However, I'm not writing a marketing blog here, so I'm going to take these marketing terms and translate them into actions you can do on your nonprofit website in order to improve your online presence.

It's no secret that nonprofits who supply their website visitors with rich & engaging multimedia content have a higher chance of keeping the viewer on their website long enough to engage them.  Countless studies encourage nonprofits to have websites that show arresting images of who they are helping, videos of volunteers having fun at events, or other multimedia sources that show impact. 

(Sorry for the audio pops at the beginning.  I did this recording on my PC, not my Mac.  Need to figure out why the PC is so resource-challenged these days!)

In this video blog I will give you an informal introduction to adding online groups to your website.  This tutorial is Drupal specific (Drupal is the website content management system that we use at IT For Change) but I suspect that other CMS tools may offer similar functionality.

The video will show how you can create and manage: