SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Graphic design and web development by a non-profit, for non-profits.

CEDC is a 501c3 nonprofit organization that partners with other non-profits on graphic design and web development projects.

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We also host groups for meeting space or overnight rooms in our building in Washington, DC.

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Site analytics, SEO and privacy

Posted by laryn on Feb 22, 2010

Keeping track of your site statistics is an important part of assessing the success of your online presence. You can see where your visitors are coming from and what they are looking at, which can help as you try to make your site as valuable as possible and measure the success of your SEO goals. Google Analytics is a common solution, but since some non-profits have privacy issues with integrating their sites with the Google Empire I'm also listing some other resources which allow you to retain your own stats on your own server.

The basics of non-profit SEO, part 9: Use an SEO browser to see what Google sees

Posted by cedc on Jan 25, 2010

Continuing our series of non-profit SEO tips, I encourage you to take a look at your site as it renders in text form, as it is "seen" by Google and other search engines.There are a number of different "SEO browsers" you can experiment with to see which of them is useful for you.

The Basics of Non-Profit SEO, Part 8: If you want to know what the search engines want, ask them

Posted by laryn on Jun 9, 2009

When you consider the question of how to optimize your site for various search engines, the obvious answer is: why not ask the search engines? All of the major search engines have some kind of guidance as to what they look at when they analyze pages and what they recommend for a page. Most of the information will parallel with the items we've already mentioned in our SEO series (e.g. create good content, don't try to be sneaky and trick search engines, make your site clean and accessible...), but you may find it useful to read the suggestions written in other ways.

The Basics of Non-Profit SEO, Part 7: Use 301 redirects after a redesign

Posted by laryn on May 15, 2009

When you redesign a site, chances are that your structure may change and your URLs may change. If you don't plan ahead, you could throw away a lot of the search engine optimization you may have already achieved. When a search engine comes back to index your site again after a redesign, it will find that many (or all) of the old URLs no longer function and it will drop them and then reindex your new pages as new pages instead of as new versions of existing pages (which already have some ranking).

The Basics of Non-Profit SEO, Part 6: Submit your site to directories

Posted by laryn on Apr 14, 2009

This is actually a subset of the third part in our non-profit SEO series, building external links, but I thought it deserved its own entry. If you've got patience, it's a good idea to submit your site to the Open Directory Project (DMOZ) and perhaps other directories -- human edited compilations of categorized sites.

The Basics of Non-Profit SEO, Part 5: Accessibility and clean code

Posted by laryn on Mar 25, 2009

As you design your site and add content, you should be considering best practices for users who are visually impaired or who browse with screen readers. It is fortunate that much of the basic advice regarding accessibility can also help with search engine optimization. "Google is blind" is a phrase you hear a lot in introductory SEO circles.

The Basics of Non-Profit SEO, Part 4: Good Content and the Long Tail

Posted by laryn on Mar 16, 2009

Continuing our series of SEO tips, we come to what is probably the most important of all: add good content to the site, and add it regularly. You are developing this site for people, not for search engine robots, so make sure that the content will draw people in. (Luckily, good content is also helpful for those search engine robots.)

The Basics of Non-Profit SEO, Part 3: External links

Posted by laryn on Mar 12, 2009

Following up on the last tip about internal linking, it makes sense that external links are also important to your search engine optimization strategy. These are links from sites other than your own and in general, the more the better, assuming the links are coming from reputable sites and with some caveats listed below. One way to think of this is that search engines consider a link from one site to another as a vote of confidence.

The Basics of Non-Profit SEO, Part 2: Internal links

Posted by laryn on Mar 9, 2009

Part two in our series on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) covers the basics of internal linking. If you remember the pages that you created in part one (corresponding to the specific keywords and phrases you are targetting), the next step is to create links from all the other keyword references on all the other pages on your website to those keyphrase landing pages.

The Basics of Non-Profit SEO, Part 1: Keywords and Keyphrases

Posted by laryn on Mar 2, 2009

As you are creating your website, you are probably interested in making it easier for your audience to find it. This post will be the first in a series of posts with some quick and easy tips to help your site rise in the search results on keywords and keyphrases which relate to your organization and the information available on your website.