Welcome to The Explorer

The Premier Online Knowledge Base for Information and
Statistics About Social Good

Browse The Explorer

SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of increasing traffic to your website through organic search engine results.


Best Practices

Search engines like Google and Bing review the content on websites to determine if the data/content matches whatever a user searched for. The optimization portion is doing your part to ensure that your content is following the rules the search engines like to see and help to prove the relevancy of your website. Having good content on your website is a big part of this, but there’s also smaller things to think about, including title tags, meta descriptions, and internal links.

SEO can seem like a daunting endeavor. Beyond learning the ins and outs, it’s a constant moving target to stay up to date with what and how search engines are determining relevancy. These are some of the first steps to can take to have a more SEO-friendly website:

Have simple URLS and meta description for all pages: Avoid using long URLS with special characters and instead create simple URLs that are easy to remember.

Include image alt text and tags. Alt text is the written copy that will appear if an image fails to load. Alt text is an important part of making sure your website is accessible to all users because screen-reading tools will use alt text to describe the image to users. Alt text is also useful for search engines, which will only understand images by their description. Make sure all the images on your website have specific and relevant text and include keywords when possible.

Build internal links to other relevant pages. In making your website easily navigable, be sure to consider where you can link your pages to one another. This helps build page authority to search engines because the more links to a certain page/topic, the more relevant the content will seem.

Do a keyword review. A keyword is a significant word (or short phrase) used to find information when researching. When thinking about your website and organization, what words would you want to be associated with your brand? What could people search to find you? Once you’ve done some thinking around that, you can use an online keyword tool and include your primary keywords in the title and header of your webpages.

While SEO is an important consideration for your website, you can be effective by making small content reviews periodically and guaranteeing everything on your website is as descriptive as it can be.


top