SEO vs. Consistent Style
August 25, 2009
In the process of promoting this year’s Capacity Building Training Series, we’re implementing some of the SEO techniques we’ve been studying.
As Communications staff, one dilemma we’ve encountered is the use of alternate spellings from what we use in the TSNE style guide. Such as “nonprofit” vs. “non-profit” and “fundraising” vs. “fund-raising,” etc. TSNE uses “nonprofit” (except for the NonProfit Center) throughout all materials and the website.
So “non-profit” (the example in question was “non-profit financial management”) does not actually appear within the text on our page. Which translates to a lower quality score for certain search terms (“non-profit fund-raising”), and thus lower SEO potential.
If you have an organizational style guide, how do you address this issue? Do you ignore the style guide on your website in order to allow for multiple options to appear within the text? Do you stick to your style guide and remain consistent? Have you created a new style rule that still allows for consistency?
Search Engine Optimization
August 26, 2008
SEO has been on our minds here at TSNE, and we’re excited to kick-off a more concerted SEO campaign this afternoon.
We’ve read a lot about SEO, and we’ve hosted a series of articles about it. It was certainly interesting to post an article and then realize – d’oh! we’re not doing x ourselves! – as we sat down to integrate the lesson learned.
But what we haven’t done yet is take a more systematic approach to our SEO, and build in techniques from the ground up. We’re so often putting up content under an immediate deadline that SEO is an afterthought.
Today we have a meeting with an outside consultant so we can finally start pulling all these pieces and techniques together in a comprehensive way. With the redesign in the works, this is the perfect opportunity to really practice what we preach. We’ll soon have some new content that we’ll be able to work with, and remap our brains to automatically think of SEO when posting.
I’m quite excited. We look forward to sharing what we learn.
Being smart about smart quotes?
August 11, 2008
When the TSNE website was last redesigned, staff looked at other nonprofit websites to get a sense of whether or not they were using smart quotes in web text. The prevailing trend seemed to be that smart quotes were common, and a choice to use smart quotes on the new site was made.
However, it turned out to be more time-consuming than intended. When under deadline, having to go through and change each individual quote and apostrophe on top of everything else was a headache.
But it has been improving over recent months. While no CMS can handle direct pasting of MS Word documents as well as it claims, it does seem to be a focus of improvement for many vendors. Because let’s face it — we all paste from Word whenever we can. Having formatting – including smart quotes – carry over cleanly is highly desirable.
So now we’re putting together thoughts for the next redesign, and it’s time to revisit the topic of smart quotes. Do we still want to use them on our website? Are other sites still using them? Will they become easier to use as CMSes work to integrate MS Word documents more cleanly?
A big question – for one of our web staff, anyway – is whether readers notice smart quotes/lack thereof, and if so, what do they think of them. Without going to look at any websites, what would you say the standard is? After going to look at your favorite websites, did your memory hold up?
Other thoughts?
Using Google Analytics?
June 26, 2008
Google Analytics now offers benchmarking statistics. Google looks at the data to determine which category it belongs in, and then removes any identifying information so that your data is anonymous when it goes into the benchmarking aggregate.
However, “for sites of a similar size, a category of industry verticals can be chosen when there is a sufficient number of accounts in that category.” Which means in order to compare your statistics to an appropriate category, there have to be enough organizations signed up.
So if you’re already using Google Analytics, sign up! (Especially any nonprofit capacity building organizations out there…) Hopefully they’re not too far off from being able to flesh out a nonprofit vertical – you could be the last organization they need to add a category.
(For now, categories under “Society” hold the most promise.)
What is required content for a nonprofit’s website?
June 25, 2008
We recently learned that there was specific EOE language – in addition to what we already had with our job postings – that we were required to place on our website to remain compliant with a funder’s guidelines. This set us to thinking about what other necessary or important things we might be missing.
This led us to discover that our directions page didn’t mention anything about building accessibility. We are now rewriting our directions to include information for those who have restricted physical abilities.
We also realized that our privacy policy didn’t migrate over in the last website transition, and are working to put it back in.
What other content do you think is necessary for a website, that might be overlooked?