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This blog is all about do-it-yourself nonprofit communications and marketing. I love helping small and medium-sized nonprofits communicate more effectively with their members, donors, volunteers and other supporters, so that together, we can all make the world a better place. I do that as a blogger, trainer, speaker, coach and consultant.
I believe that even the smallest nonprofit staffs with the most modest budgets can achieve tremendous results through savvy marketing and communications. I hope this blog and my online marketing training and other resources encourage you to do just that, while helping you grow personally as a nonprofit marketer and communications professional.
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me with your questions and comments. You can also learn more about hiring me to speak at your conference or workshop and to assist you as a coach or consultant.
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When you write your web content, you are writing first for real people and second for search engine spiders. For your website to be as successful as possible, you need to keep both in mind.
Prominent keywords are important for both audiences. They help real people skim your page, so they can decide if they are in the right place or not and they help the search engines figure out what your page is about.
So where do you put them? Here are nine good places to use keywords.
1. In your page title. This is what appears at the top of the browser window when someone visits your website. It appears in the page code in between the title tags in the head section.
2. In your page description. Visitors don’t see this, but the search engines do. This is the two lines of text that appear below the main title in search engine results. It appears in the page code between the description tags in the head section.
3. In your page URL. Using your keywords in your page URL (what goes after the www.) can also be helpful with search engines. That’s why lots of blogs, including this one, use post titles in their URLs.
4. In your headings and subheadings. Make it easy for your readers to very quickly see what your page is about by using lots of headings and subheadings.
5. In your first sentence and your first paragraph. Make sure your important keywords appear here — the earlier, the better.
6. In your last paragraph. Use your keywords at the end of your content too.
7. Elsewhere in your body copy. When keywords fall naturally throughout your article, consider bolding them. Don’t go overboard with it or it will be a distraction. But if it makes the article easier to skim, bold those keywords.
8. In your link text. Instead of linking to words like “click here,” use your keywords in your link anchor text.
9. In your ALT tags on images. The search engines can’t read images (yet). With every image, include a bit of text called the ALT tag and use your keywords in that text.
Don’t worry about the keyword tags in the head section. Though it would seem like the obvious place to put keywords, it’s too obvious, and the search engines don’t pay much attention to that tag any longer.
Learn more about writing for the web during the August 14, 2008 webinar, Online Writing: Dos and Don’ts of Writing for the Web and Email.
Tags: keywords, online-writing, website
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The biggest mistake that a nonprofit can make with its website is to use it as an old-fashioned brochure, where you immediately hit the visitor with your long, jargon-filled mission statement, right at the top or smack in the middle of the home page, followed by bulleted lists of “projects” or “services.”
Why is this so bad? Because it’s all about the organization (and usually the most boring parts at that) and it shows little interest in what your website visitors really care about.
But isn’t our website supposed to be about us, you ask?
Yes and no. Yes, it’s about you and what you do, but organized in a way that’s easy and intuitive for your site visitor. What they want is more important than what you think they should be interested in.
Two Easy Ways to Organize Your Site for Your Visitors
Let me show you what I mean. There are two easy ways to organize your website so it is more audience-focused.
The first is to divide sections according to who the visitors are. The home page of KidsHealth.org is a splash page with links to sites for parents, kids and teens. Each group is going to respond best to information presented in ways that speak to their age groups and specific needs and questions. Ultimately the facts may be the same on each mini-site, but the language and presentation are totally different depending on the audience.
The second way, and the one I usually prefer, is to organize your website around (1) the answers to the top questions people are most likely to have and (2) the actions they want to be able to take on your website. What three main questions would a potential website visitor have and what three things would they like to be able to do on your site? Figure that out and organize your site accordingly.
The New York City Meals of Wheels program, for example, has three tabs right across the top: Get Meals, Volunteer and Support Us. That about sums it up, doesn’t it? The overwhelming majority of people who come to a Meals on Wheels website will want to find out how to get meals delivered or how to volunteer to deliver them, and “support us” is thrown in for good measure. The left side menu includes additional information, but those three tabs right at the top stand out, and show me that they know exactly why people are coming to their website.
Learn more about nonprofit websites during these upcoming webinars: July 30 – Attracting More Website Visitors: Traffic-Building Tips for Nonprofits | August 14 – Online Writing: Dos and Don’ts of Writing for the Web and Email | August 28 – Online Marketing Basics for Nonprofits: From Email to Social Media
Tags: audience-focused
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Posted by Kivi Leroux Miller on May 15, 2008 in
Annual Reports,
Copywriting,
Fundraising,
Media Relations,
Nonprofit Communications,
Nonprofit Marketing Strategy,
Online Courses,
Online Marketing,
Professional Development,
Storytelling,
Writing for the Web If you’ve been waiting for me to make the recordings from the Nonprofit Marketing Guide webinar series available, wait no more. The following titles are now all available when you purchase an All-Access Pass.
For $97, you’ll get to view all of these webinars and any I add in the next twelve weeks. You also get to attend any and all live webinars I host for the next twelve weeks, at no additional charge.
Nonprofit Storytelling: How to Write Your Nonprofit’s Best Stories
Recorded May 14, 2008.
How to Connect with Generation Y
Recorded May 7, 2008. Featuring Sam Davidson.
What Do Baby Boomer Donors Want from Your Nonprofit?
Recorded May 1, 2008. Featuring Jeff Brooks.
Online Writing: Dos and Don’ts of Writing for the Web and Email
Recorded April 24, 2008.
How to Write a Press Release Reporters Will Love
Recorded April 17, 2008. Featuring Claire Meyerhoff.
Branding for Nonprofits: What Is It and Should You Do It?
Recorded April 10, 2008. Audio only, featuring Nancy Schwartz.
Converting Your Print Newsletter into an Email Newsletter
Recorded March 20, 2008.
How to Write a Four-Page Nonprofit Annual Report
Recorded March 13, 2008.
Can We Find You on Google? Keywords and Search Engine Optimization for Nonprofits
Featuring David Westbrook. Recorded March 6, 2008.
How to Make Your Nonprofit Brochures Pop! – The Crash Course
Recorded February 27, 2008.
What Should We Write About? Storytelling Ideas for Nonprofits
Recorded February 13, 2008.
Getting Reporters to Cover Your Nonprofit: Tell Your Story So They’ll Tell It Too
Recorded February 6, 2008. Audio only, featuring Claire Meyerhoff.
Yes, it’s a ton of great training at a very reasonable price. Ready to get your pass? Register now.
Tags: nonprofit, Nonprofit Communications, nonprofit-marketing, training
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Posted by Kivi Leroux Miller on Apr 21, 2008 in
Nonprofit Communications,
Writing for the Web This week’s Nonprofit Marketing Guide webinar is Online Writing: Dos and Don’ts of Writing for the Web and Email (Thursday, 4/24/08, 3 pm ET, $35). I’ll be talking about these three tips and many more.
Answer readers’ questions. Yahoo! and Google are the most popular sites on the web because people are searching for answers to the questions they have. The ubiquitous “FAQ” page is so popular on websites because it directly answers those questions. There’s an important lesson here: Your website content should be focused on the needs and interests of your site visitors. Write your content with your audience in mind at all times.
Write in chunks. Your website is made up of pages and those pages are made up of paragraphs. Each page and each paragraph should be about one specific thing. Organize your text into small, manageable blocks (chunks) of information. Read more of my tips on chunking specifically. Chunking also makes your site easier to skim, which is how most people actually read online.
Cut everything back. Online writing must be much shorter and tighter than what you’d traditionally write for publication on paper. The general rule of thumb is to cut your print text in half when putting it online. Shoot for headlines that are 4-8 words and sentences that are no more than 20 words. Limit paragraphs to six sentences and articles to 500 words. Of course, these are just guidelines, but they’ll help you get closer to where you need to be.
Learn more during this week’s webinar.
Tags: chunking, email, online-writing, web-writing
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Next Thursday’s Nonprofit Marketing Guide webinar is on keywords and search engine optimization (SEO) for nonprofits and will feature guest speaker David Westbrook, an SEO expert with lots of nonprofit experience. If you just crinkled your nose and said, “Huh?” or if you are your office’s accidental techie and default webmaster, this webinar is for you. If think you’ve done everything right and your website still doesn’t come up when you put your keywords into search engines like Google and Yahoo!, this webinar is for you too.
I asked David for a sneak peek at some of the insights he’ll share next week and here’s a good one:
“When it comes to esthetics, search engines couldn’t be much more disinterested. This is because every image looks the same to a search engine. Imagine walking through the Louvre and where others see the Mona Lisa all you see is .img and further on where others see Madonna with the Green Cushion, you again see .img. This is the world of a search engine. On the other hand, search engines are voracious readers, and while they can’t interpret a word, they do know how often it appears and they are able to assign a level of importance to it depending on where it appears and what is surrounding it.”
David goes on to talk about the importance of the ALT tag:
“Every image should have what is known as an alt tag (technically an alt attribute). I am sometimes asked if this includes when menu items are images instead of text. As it turns out, they are especially important here. Their importance extends beyond search engines, as they are chiefly important to the blind who use screen readers that have no way of knowing a link exists if it is just an image without an alt tag.”
David will share lots of ways that nonprofits can improve their search engine rankings, whether you have complete control over the design of your website or you can only write articles for it.
Get the details on Can We Find You on Google? Keywords and Search Engine Optimization for Nonprofits, taking place Thursday, March 6, 2008 at 2:00 p.m. Eastern (11:00 a.m. Pacific). Registration is $35 and includes everyone in your office who can fit around a single computer monitor and speaker phone.
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Chunking your Web and email text is one of the essential online writing skills I’ll be discussing during “Online Writing: Dos and Don’ts of Writing for the Web and Email,” a webinar on Wednesday, February 20 at 2:00 p.m. ET. Registration is open until 1:30 p.m. and costs just $35.
When people read on paper, they usually start at the beginning and work their way through in a linear fashion from page one to page two to page three, etc. When people read on the Web, however, they start where Google sent them, and that could be anywhere on your website. Once they get there, your website visitors will quickly skim the page, looking for chunks of text and keywords that tell them they are in the right spot.
What is Chunking?
When you chunk text, you break down what may have started as one really long article into smaller, manageable, more easily understood blocks of text. Your goal should be to create chunks of information that can stand on their own, but that also fit within the larger context of your website.
How Big is the Ideal Chunk?
So how big or small is the perfect chunk of text on a website? You need to find the sweet spot between too little and too much text. If you put too little information on a page, you force your reader to click around for the details, which is annoying. But if your chunks are too big, you make it difficult for your readers to immediately find the key points they are seeking.
For example, you might break down a 2,000 guide into three web pages of 600-700 words each. On each of the web pages, you could then break those 600 words into three blocks of 200 words each, complete with their own subheadings. Many professional online writers would advocate even shorter pages (no more than 500 words) and paragraphs (no more than 100 words).
Adding bulleted lists, writing in short sentences, highlighting keywords, and linking to related articles and details also contribute to successful chunking.
Which Page Has Better Chunking?
What questions would you have if you were interested in adopting a pet? Take a look at these two pages from two humane societies in Colorado and see who answers your questions more quickly.
Adoption Process Page at Humane Society of the Pikes Peak Region
Adoption Process Page at the Dumb Friends League/Denver Humane Society
Both pages discuss the pet adoption process, but one does a much better job at chunking the information.
The Pikes Peak page contains over 1,500 words and only seven subheadings. There are no bulleted lists, highlighted keywords, or links to more details to help visitors skim through the page to find the specific answers they are seeking.
In contrast, the Denver Dumb Friends League page contains about 1,000 words and has ten subheadings. The paragraphs are much shorter and you’ll find several bulleted lists and links to details. Think back to those questions you had about adopting a pet and I bet this page answers them more quickly.
The Pikes Peak page also contains the same kind of information, but in buried form that requires actual reading, rather than skimming.
This article written for teachers at Dartmouth who are putting course materials online provides some additional perspectives on chunking.
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Do you know the important differences between how people read on paper and how they read on a computer screen? Do you understand how those differences drastically change the way you should write for your website visitors and email newsletter readers?
If you aren’t sure, I’ll show you how to go from confused to confident in under an hour. Register for my next live webinar happening Thursday, December 13, at 2:00 p.m. ET. (That’s 1:00 – 2:00 p.m. CT, Noon – 1:00 p.m. MT, and 11:00 a.m. – Noon PT).
From the comfort of your own desk, you’ll learn the important differences between reading and writing on paper and online, how to make your writing more appealing to online readers, and simple word choice and formatting tricks that can drastically improve your website’s or email’s performance.
You’ll also learn ways to organize your thoughts and ideas to match the way people use the Web and how to convert your existing print publications for use online.
If you want your website visitors and e-newsletter subscribers to actually read what you write, instead of quickly navigating away from your web pages or deleting your email, you have to learn to write in a whole new way. This webinar will show you how.
Registration costs just $49. When you consider how much time you spend on your website and e-newsletter, that’s a tiny investment to make sure your messages get across. During the webinar, you’ll have the chance to ask questions over the phone or via chat, using a toll-free, user-friendly webinar service.
Get the details and register today!
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I hate to do this, but I’m postponing the webinar scheduled for this Friday on how to write for the web and email. I’ve got a terrible chest cold and if I talk for more than five minutes at a time, my voice cracks like a 13-year-old boy’s and then disappears into a barely audible whisper. I’ll reschedule soon!
More Goodies: Get Kivi's Nonprofit Marketing Tips E-Newsletter (2-3 times per month)
