Rank Higher in the Search Engines Through Content and Backlinks

Even the web is going 'Organic'. Search engines use the term organic to describe pure search results, and these results are where you want your site to appear. When you use a search engine, you'll usually find two sets of search results. One set is the adds. These display above or to the side of the actual search results and are usually in the general category you're searching for. The other set, is the organic search results that should pertain to the specific words or phrases you were searching for. The question is, how to you get your site higher up the list? Why do some sites that are similar to yours appear on page 1, but your site is no where to be found? I'm going to share some general concepts with you about Search Engine Optimization(SEO) for your church, non-profit, or small business website, and point you in some directions to learn more.

Content

Your site must be content rich. If your church, non-profit, or small business website contains enough pages to tell people who you are, what you do, and how they can contact you, you may be thinking your site is doing pretty good. Well, it may be good for those people who do find it. But the reality is, if your 10 - 20 page site has remained that way for weeks, months, or years at a time, you're going to find yourself in the bottomless search engine abyss. A quality website that has even a remote chance of ranking high in the search engines should have 100's of pages of quality content. Those pages should contain at least 300 words each, and you should be adding more every week. You might be thinking you already have every piece of information about your organization on your website, and there is no way you can come up with more every week. It's time to start thinking outside your four walls and begin looking at the bigger picture surrounding what you do. Blogging is one of the easiest ways to add content to you site. If you're a church, start blogging about the community, your members, experiences, anything that will add relevant content to your website. Non-profits should start blogging about the people they serve, the issues they deal with, volunteering, philanthropy, etc. And, small businesses should start blogging about their products, their services, their competition, success stories, anything and everything you can think of that relates to what you're trying to accomplish. Whatever you choose to blog about, be sure to include the ability for visitors to comment. Then, they will be adding content to your site for you! Another great option is starting a forum on your site. Forums are typically moderated by you and/or your staff, but the majority of the content comes from the users themselves. If you're forum is successful, your users could be generating 100's of pages for you everyday!

Backlinks

You may have heard the term 'backlinks' floating around the internet. Backlinks are links placed on other websites that link back to your site. For example, I could put a link to Google right here: Search the web. I've just given Google another backlink...as if they needed it. There are three important parts to a backlink that we need to take a look at. The first is the target of the link itself. In the Google example, when clicked that link will take you to Google's home page. So, it is a backlink to Google's home page. But, the text that is actually linked is 'Search the web'. This tells you, and the search engines, that Google's home page has something to do with searching the web. It's very important to use specific text in your links. If you have links to your site that are nothing more than your URL, your missing a valuable piece to your backlinks. In addition to the actual target and the text of the link, is the information surrounding it. Since this entire blog is talking about search engine optimization, and it links to Google's home page, this backlink is going to tell the search engines that Google has something to do with searching the web, and probably has some relationship with search engines. This is the general idea you want to follow for your website. You want links to your site using relevant text both in the link itself and surrounding it. This can happen naturally by people discussing your church, non-profit, or small business in their blog or in forums. Or, you can increase the number of backlinks to your own site by submitting articles relevant to your organization's interest to other sites such as article directories or informational based sites that discuss things relevant to organization. I would recommend learning more about this in James Martell's Backlink Workshop. There are many, many factors involved in the ranking of search engine results. These two are, in may opinion, the most important that can be controlled by you. Learn how increase your sites content weekly, and add relevant backlinks to your site, and you'll see steady improvements over time. In addition, use the tools that are out there to examine your site, find weaknesses, and make improvements. A few I would recommend are Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, and Raven SEO Tools.