How People Find Your Organization on the Internet
When supporting a cause using the internet, one of your primary goals is to help get more visitors and traffic to the various websites which are connected with your cause. As covered in my earlier post, we will use the fictitious www.shoes4all.org for the purpose of example.
The sources of this traffic can be broken down into a few basic categories:
- Search Engines – People type in certain terms in a search engine, and websites connected with your cause come up as search results. Example: A person types “how can I help African children” into a search engine, and one of the Shoes-for-Africa entries comes up as a result, with a web page explaining how their donation will help get shoes to African children.
- Direct referrals from other websites – Example: Another charity which provides food to poor children has a website called www.food4all.org, (another made-up name at the time of this writing) which has a page with links to other charities. One of these links leads to to www.shoes4all.org. A person visits www.food4all.org, arrives to the “links” page, and clicks on the link to www.shoes4all.org .
- Word-of-Mouth and Offline Advertising – This includes offline referrals, where people tell friends and contacts to visit the Shoes For All website, people emailing each other about the Shoes for All movement, people passing around business cards or flyers with URLs of Shoes for All websites, and notices and billboards which advertise and give the address of the website, and even bumper stickers, T-Shirts, or coffee cups with the website address printed on them.
- Direct Traffic – This would occur if a visitor directly types in the address of
< strong>in his or her browser, in order to reach the website. This usually would occur when the person already knows about the website and remembers its address, or when the person is being referred through an offline channel as in point #3 above.
The first method – search engines – is possibly the most important one because of its potentials to reach anyone and everyone who might be interested in the Shoes for All movement (even if they have never heard of the movement before).
Your goal is to have your organization’s websites come up as often as possible in search results, whenever people search for related keywords.
There will be a few principle keywords that result in traffic to your site, and there will be some variations of those keywords. For example, your site might receive traffic from these main keywords:
| Keyword | Visits in One Day |
| Shoes for Charity | 150 |
| Donate Shoes | 137 |
| Charity shoes and clothing | 100 |
| Shoe charities | 57 |
| Food and clothing fundraisers | 45 |
| How can I donate shoes to African children? | 13 |
| Shipping shoes to poor countries | 6 |
| Give shoes to kids for school | 4 |
| Why don’t children in Uruguay have shoes. | 3 |
| Donate my old shoes | 3 |
| Help African kids walk school | 3 |
| Shoes for Israeli kindergärtners | 1 |
A bar graph of these keywords would look like this:
Why am I showing you this? So I can explain an important term which I will be using in this book. That term is Long Tail Keywords.
Long tail keywords are the variations of keywords which can be used to find your organization’s websites, when each variation in itself does not get a large volume of searches, but all combined, they get a considerable amount of traffic.
Why are they called “long tail keywords?” Look at the bar graph above and imagine that it is a picture of a blue animal, perhaps a dog, with the left side being the head, and the right side being a long tail. All of those keywords which make up the “tail” of our bar graph are called “long tail keywords.”
Good. Now that that is out of the way, I can use the term “long tail keywords” and have some confidence that you know what I am talking about.
My point right now is that you will want your organization’s websites to come up as often as possible, when people type related search terms in to Google or other search engines.
Why do People Search?
One could consider that, when people type in a search term, they are stating a problem or a question. They are looking for a solution or an answer. When your website appears in the search result, it should give the solution to that problem or the answer to that question, as often as possible. Searchers may have never heard of your organization before. All they know is that they are looking for information on something, or they are trying to solve some kind of problem.
If your organization has a solution or an answer to that problem, it should come up as a result when people type in those search terms.
That seems obvious but it is far too often overlooked.
When a person types in “charity for children” your organization should be amongst the search results, as it should be when they type in “shoes for children,” “help Burmese kids,” “donate to charity in Ecuador,” or whatever the case may be – providing that the organization has branches in those areas and runs programs which help solve those problems.
If you work for the organization in question, or if you are the webmaster of one of their websites, its important to understand this.
But what if you don’t? What if you are simply a member of the public who supports the Shoes for All movement? Where do you come in? Can you make a difference in the SEO of the Shoes for All movement?
Yes, you can.
In fact, you can make a big difference, and with far less technical knowledge than you might think.
The reason for this concerns the subject of my next post in this series.
