Building a new charity website? Make it SEO-friendly!

Planning and building a new website should be an exciting and enjoyable process for a charity comms team. Thinking carefully about your users' needs and planning what you want to say is all part of the planning process.

But when it comes to content, what do you need to bear in mind to rank well on search engines? Here are my top tips for making your content SEO-friendly:-

Write interesting content - targetted at your user groups

When planning your website, you will have given a lot of thought to the groups of people that you are publishing content for. We help our clients do this by stepping through a set of workshops before we start development.

Make sure you adopt the right tone and vocabulary for those groups. Even more importantly, the content itself must be relevant and interesting for those visitors. This improves your site's reputation on the likes of Google. And more inbound traffic means better ranking.

Make sure each page has a clear purpose - and use specific keyword phrases on every one

Because you know your users, you are best placed for anticipating which search terms they will use when looking for your services online. Try to focus the page on a single purpose and use potential search phrases within your copy. Make sure you stick to the page's keyword phrases as far as possible so your subject matter is clear to search engines and site visitors alike.

Organise your content - URLs, titles and headings

If possible, use your keyword phrase in the URL for your page and the page title. If it feels natural, you could repeat some or all of it in one or two section headings, too. When it comes to search engine indexing, these are the parts of your content that are most important.

Think about the links within your page

Try to avoid links like 'read more'. Tell the user - and the visiting search engine crawler - where that link is going to using more informative link text. If you can re-use the destination page's keyword phrase in your link, so much the better.

Use an SEO-friendly CMS

A lot can happen behind the scenes to help content writers have the biggest impact when it comes to SEO. Configured properly, a modern CMS like Drupal will organise and update your metadata automatically. This is data carried in the web page that isn't visible to the user, but informs visiting search engine crawlers about the content on the page.

I hope you picked up some useful content ideas. If you'd like to talk about how we can help build a new charity site that scores better with search engines, please get in touch or call on 01273 506611.