Recommendations

Select a Primary Keyphrase for Each Webpage

Search engines treat each page of your website as a single entity that ranks independently of other pages. To maximize the traffic referred to your website from search engines, feature a unique keyphrase on each webpage. The featured keyphrase should match the search term that you anticipate Google users would type when searching for the information that your page provides.

For example, if your website advocates on behalf of animal welfare, each webpage has the potential to attract users interested in a specific animal-related subtopic. One webpage may rank well for "animal testing," another for "bottlenose dolphins," and another for "feral cats." People who are looking for information about feral cats are not likely to type a search term as general as "animal welfare." Instead, they will be as specific as possible to avoid wasting their time.

Each keyphrase-optimized webpage acts as an entrance to your website. The more highly ranked webpages you have, the more traffic your website will receive. If you have three webpages that each feature a unique keyphrase, you have three separate chances to attract readers. If you have 100 webpages that each feature a unique keyphrase, then you have 100 chances to attract readers. As a result, it should be no surprise that most of the top-ranked websites on the internet offer 100 or more pages, each optimized for a specific keyphrase.

For most nonprofit websites, this technique works best when the keyphrases featured on each page receive a moderate amount of search traffic at Google and Yahoo. Unless you have a very popular website, it's best to steer clear of the extremes. If your targeted keyphrase is not popular enough, it will not bring in very many click-thrus. On the other hand, if the targeted keyphrase is too popular, you will likely lose the battle for a top position at Google and Yahoo to better-funded commercial competition. CharityGuide.org, for example, asks service project writers to avoid optimizing for keyphrases that generate less than 8,000 or more than 80,000 monthly searches.

Fortunately, Yahoo offers a free "Keyword Selector Tool" at http://inventory.overture.com that writers can use to calculate the number of searches per month served by Yahoo. The search volumes reported by the Keyword Selector Tool account for approximately 25% of the total search traffic at US websites.

When using the Keyword Selector Tool, type your possible keyphrases into the search bar to determine which phrases are worth the effort to optimize for. For example, you'll find that "blood donation" generates more than twice as many potential readers as "donating blood." So, if you were writing an article on this topic, you would be wise to include both phrases in your article, but give more prominence to "blood donation."

The next targeting factor to consider is relevance. It's tempting to get excited about terms that get lots of searches, but sometimes these terms are too general to use. This is especially true for single words. For example, the word "charities" receives a lot of searches each month, but the intent of an internet surfer using such a general search term varies too widely. For instance, a Google user searching for "charities" might want to donate money to a charity, volunteer for a charity, receive assistance from a charity, or gather leads for sales of volunteer-management software to charities. To optimize effectively, select a keyphrase that is both moderately popular and relevant to the webpage content.