SEO Advice.

willhub

willhub

willhub

Caporegime
Joined
3 Jan 2006
Posts
25,357
Location
Chadderton, Oldham
Hi.

Basically, I am volunteering at a charity to help them out on various things, one of the things that they wanted me to have a go at was SEO, Search Engine Optimization, I have made it clear that I am no expert and have limited knowledge in this area, but I find it an interest and an opportunity to learn about it and also some more experience to put on my CV.

So far, for their website, I have identified two issues that need to be sorted, the lack of content description in the META tags and also the absence of keywords as I am sure these two things will have an impact on how well the site does in regards to search listings. The site also appears to have now h1 tags at all.

Now I am using Google AdWords to determine the best keywords, one of them is simply Charity, but I know I'm going to need some more unique keywords than that. But what I'd like to know is, would adding "charity" to the keywords actually help the site at all? I mean, as far as I can see, all that's going to do is get it a listing but it could be hundreds of pages down the list.

So what I'm missing is how do I get it up to the top, should I be looking at Google Grants which I assume is related to AdWords? I'm sure the charity would be eligible for Google Grants.


Any help would be great!


Thanks
 
Firstly meta tags aren't as strongly weighted in ranking algorithms as they used to be. They're still worth using, but not the be-all and end-all.

Adding the word 'charity' all over your content probably won't help a great deal as no one searches for just 'charity'. You want to pin point what your potential visitors will want to be searching for. For example, add some keywords to cover your location and also about what your charity supports, so that if someone searched for 'cancer charity manchester', there would be a good chance you'd at least be on the first page.
 
So it's important that the web content itself has these keywords? Then are they also listed in the META tags? I'm thinking very carefully about what keywords I should use, I'm finding it quite tricky on figuring out the correct keywords, I'm assuming anything that has like a high amount of local and global searches would be ideal.

Also am I correct in thinking that keywords in content should be in heading tags mainly?

*edit"

Thanks Cuchulain I'll keep that in mind.
 
And if I do that using properly chosen and good keywords will that succeed in vastly improving where the website shows on search listings and also the traffic the site may receive?
 
Also try and build traffic from other sites if you can (valid sites, not gateway domains etc.), our company has top ranking on google for all of our preferred keywords purely from having a link back to us on every site we build.
 
You can also use a lot more keywords in than you think by using title tags and the like. For example:

<h1>Our cancer charity work</h1>

..to..

<h1 title="Our cancer charity work">Our cancer charity work</h1>

Do this for every header tag, anchor tags, images, everything possible. The title tag doesn't have to match the content of the tag either. Take a look at www.idoweddingfilms.co.uk (one of my sites) and hover over the links on the right to see some examples of what I mean.

Try to include the keyword in the URL as well, so www.domain.com/cancer-charity-work rather than www.domain.com/our-work.

And don't forget that when it comes to body copy try to keep it as coherent as possible while slipping in keywords.

And, most importantly, remember that SEO isn't the be-all and end-all. You might be on the #1 spot and getting thousands of hits a month, but if your bounce rate is 80% because you're not providing the right content or your website fails generally then it'll all be wasted.
 
What is the website for this charity and what kind of charity is it?

The main thing is that your website has content talking about the things which are relevant to the charity and includes those keywords on the page that users would likely type into a search engine.

That is the first part of it - but there will be countless other charity sites that have similar keywords on their sites, so why would you come up higher than them? You wont - unless you offer something useful on your site in terms of articles and knowledge or services, and then promote those around the internet, when you get popular with the people, search sites like Google pick up on that wave of popularity and show you higher up in the listings - it's all just a big popularity contest.
 
It's a charity called Act 4 Africa.

I won't be able to make the actual adjustments to the website as all that is done by an outside company, all I can do is work out exactly what needs to be done, make the recommendations for the boss to send to the outside company to be put in place.
 
That sounds like a nightmare. Either they should be an SEO company in which case they should already know everything apart from the keywords you want to target, or they're not in which case they won't do the job as well as it could be done.
 
Russinating said:
That sounds like a nightmare. Either they should be an SEO company in which case they should already know everything apart from the keywords you want to target, or they're not in which case they won't do the job as well as it could be done.
Click to expand...

I'll contact them, it's evident they have a Google web master tools account as there is a long code for it placed in the meta data on the web pages.
 
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