This is one area nonprofits truly excel in. While businesses often resort to hiring professional content writers to fill out the content on their websites, nonprofits as a rule tend to have real, valuable, related content on their sites. A business might have a vested interest (usually search engine rankings, ironically) in fluffing their sites out with extra content, but nonprofits tend to focus on their content first and on their search engine rankings later.
Ironically, this is precisely what has been advised by search engine optimization specialists all along...write your content for your site visitors, and not for Google. Instead of trying to decide how to make Google think highly of your site, you should be writing your content to be helpful and useful to your site visitors...and Google rewards natural, organic, "real" content with higher rankings. This gives most nonprofits an edge.
Similarly, nonprofits can often add content streams to their sites that for-profit businesses find expensive or inappropriate. For example, a nonprofit organization working with children and play therapy could find it relatively easy to add staff blogs to their site, where their own resident experts on pedagogy and play therapy can regularly post content. Since Google loves blogs, and almost all of these blog posts will be related to the field the organization works in, this is a great way for the organization's site to develop content that is rich in value and updated daily. The result is the search engines will begin crawling the site more often and in more depth, and the site and its blogs will begin showing up on Technorati and other blog search indexes. Eventually, this will translate into better Google rankings, simply because the site becomes much richer in valuable, meaningful content than a for-profit business site would be. Other ideas include publishing an online newsletter, creating an on-topic journal, or syndicating content from other nonprofits working in the same field.
Comments
True, but...
You're completely correct about this. Beyond the fact that .org domains rank better than .com, and .net, non-profits rarely resort to using the kinds of marketese that is the trademark of professional content writers. I've seen entire pages that read like, "We provide enterprise level solutions that fit your businesses' bottom line, and help you leverage the power of the global information economy enabling you to move at the speed of the internet." Strangely, these corporations are suprised that not very many people google, "enterprise level solutions".
That said, non-profits have a big weakness, in my opinion, when it comes to making their content usable, searchable, and easy to filter through. I think if non-profits have anything to learn in the content arena, its going to be from journalism. For example, non-profiters love long titles to articles. Nothing makes an executive director as happy as titling an article something like, "A Comprehensive Timeline and History of Community Networking Initiatives, and Volunteer Based Organizations"
Looks like crap on menus, and the headline spans three whole lines. Worst of all, however, it ruins the point of a headline -- a quick 3 word idea of what the content is about. This seems like a small point, however when a site has more than a hundred articles, these long headlines significantly increase the amount effort the user has to go through to find the content they want.