As some of you may know, I worked for a while in a corporate search engine optimization department...one of the top groups in the midwest, specializing in highly competitive industries. It was a small group of us working in SEO, working exclusively with organic, legitimate techniques to get top rankings for our clients.
Since leaving the corporate world in early 2005, I've applied many of those same techniques to my volunteer work with nonprofits, with dramatic results. Nonprofits, as a rule, are complete strangers to SEO work, and the ones that are aware of it are generally unable to afford the services of most SEO firms and freelancers. Also, since nonprofits are generally not engaged in e-commerce activities (at least, not on a large scale) they tend to question the value of such efforts.
There are, however, some basic techniques that ensure that the search engines will find and index your site's content. Even for a nonprofit with no "product" for sale, there is significant value in this. In addition to establishing your legitimacy, it also makes it easier for prospective volunteers, collaborators, and contributors to find you, instead of the other way around.
Most of these methods are simple...just things to keep in mind while you're designing and building your organization's site, and as you continue to maintain it. No investment required, and it often won't take any extra time to implement, either. Since there isn't much competition for keywords in most nonprofit fields, it's (relatively) easy to get visible rankings, even if you're a small nonprofit. An example? A nonprofit I volunteered with recently became the first site listed for the keywords "nonprofit ngo" (without the quotes) in Google...and held that position for six months, until I left the organization and stopped maintaining their site. They were also ranked at the top of their category for every conceivable keyword, including the name of the city they're located in. With a little reading, you could be ready to achieve the same level of results for your organization's site.
