Considering that about half the people on the Internet find you through some kind of search engine query, it’s vitally important that you show up everywhere you should. Such are the intricacies of search engine optimization.

Improving your SEO is an on-going task, but here are five mistakes you can make to really kill your SEO strategy.

1. Use images for headings

Some people think regular old text is too boring for headings, so they use pictures instead. A major no-no. Search engines like header tags (< h1 >, < h2 >, etc.), so use these instead of graphics. You can always change the style of them through CSS if you don’t like the way they appear.

2. Leave image tags blank

This mistake is incredibly common, but it’s also incredibly easy to fix. Whenever you have an image display on a page, make sure you fill in the so-called “alt tag.” It’s a handy place to stash keywords (search engines figure anything you illustrate is important, so they pay attention), and it helps with overall accessibility.

3. Bad spelling

Search engines are skeptical of crummy spelling. Get a dictionary.

4. Flash only

Flash is, well, flashy, but it’s not incredibly usable. It’s hard for people to navigate, and also hard for search engines to catalog. Provide an HTML alternative so make everybody happy. As an added bonus, anybody using a hand-held device (like an iPhone) will have an easier time reading your site.

5. Ugly URLs

URLs with a string of nonsensical text does nothing for your site. They’re confusing, you can never type them into an address bar and search engines hate them. Instead, make sure you’re using real English in the address. Check out this article’s address for an example.

[This little gem is the text of issue our e-mail newsletter subscribers just received. Want a slice of this foryourself? Sign up now.]

Hi, Friends.

Websites, you know, are never done. They’re as close as you can get to living and breathing for something made of lines of code stored on computers around the globe. Trends change, organizations’ missions change and outside forces change too.

One big outside force recently changed, namely Internet Explorer 8. Any time a Web browser receives a major upgrade, and people are encouraged to switch over, it means that old websites may no longer work properly. Even if you have chosen to let IE8 (which has its own host of problems) drift by without you, not all the people who are coming to your website have.

It’s important to take the time on a regular basis to make sure your website is keeping up with the technology around it. It’s a job that requires regular tending, but we’ve made it easier for you by assembling the Healthy Website Checklist you can follow.

http://talance.com/healthy-website-checklist

Bookmark it or print it out so you remember to keep making sure your website still works.

Of course, keeping websites ship-shape and Bristol fashion is one of our specialties at Talance, so give us a holler (888-810-9109 or use this form) if we can help breathe new life into your website.

Your Internet pal,

Monique

The Rachel Coalition provides services for victims of domestic violence, but its website was limited to a few informational pages and uninspiring design. Here’s how we helped.

»Read more

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It helps to see what other organizations are doing right to guide your own Web strategy. Here are six stand-out examples from non-profits that have a presence with websites, Twitter and Facebook.

Websites

10ThousandDoors.org is a gutsy move by the United Methodist Church to be a truly interactive experience. The whole site is innovative, but the Talk page is a new breed of discussion boards that has really opened up sharing and communication.

Take the Walk has a great counter on its homepage. They tally the number of miles supporters have walked to support fighting AIDS in Africa. The placement is perfect: front and center. This ensures the site is geared toward pulling in new supporters.

Twitter

Ashoka started promoting their e-book through Twitter and quickly built up a following. This multi-tasking post is smart, because they thank their followers, help everyone feel included and continue the promotion all in one Tweet.

The town of Richmond, VA, had a double-header of a good idea. First, they started a city wiki (others here), and then they set up an automatic Twitter feed that publishes any updates to the wiki. It gives you a real-time, accessible view of any changes that happen at the town level.

Facebook

Peta launched a Facebook Cause to raise funds and donations to protect animals. They’ve raised nearly $60,000 and have enabled others to recruit more supporters and raise funds on their behalf.

Synagogue 3000 claimed a great web address so they’d be easy to find on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/synagogue3000) rather than the ugly and hard to remember stream of numbers that Facebook adds to the end of your URL when it assigns one to you. Click here to set yours.

[Photo credit: Spaghetti and Meatballs (explore) by jshj, on Flickr]

Inclusiveness is always nice to have in any project, Web-related or otherwise. Give everybody a voice, and everybody’s happy, right?

Wrong.

In fact, having too many voices feeding into your website can create chaos for your users. The problem is that everybody has their own ideas about what belongs on a website, and those ideas might compete with one another. Plus, there’s only so much room on a homepage. You can’t cram everything on.

Add to this the fact that some of those people jockeying for their ideas to appear on your website know absolutely nothing about creating a manageable experience for Web visitors, and you’ve got one snarled, political plate of website spaghetti.

If you’re at a non-profit, there’s a good chance a little light bulb is going on over your head right now. You’ve been there. Too many people trying to take control of the site. Sadly, this is a problem non-profits frequently have, since many organizations are managed by committee. That might (or might not) make sense for day-to-day operations, but it never works with websites.

Nip this problem in the bud. Take these steps to make sure your Web project starts off with a clear vision and a clean outcome.

Include everybody – at the start.

Our solution is to send out a “needs assessment” at the very beginning of a project. This survey, distributed to a whole bunch of people, gives everybody a chance to say what they think is important to have on the website and makes everyone feel included.

Form a small committee.

Hand those surveys over to the core website team to scan for insights, ideas and important issues. And, of course, to sort out the muck. But importantly, this body is small, and has only one head.

Appoint a strategist.

It’s helpful that the leader of that team be uniformly concerned with the experience your website visitors have, the marketing and business message of your organization and have some idea of the way technology works. If this isn’t possible, at least choose a person humble enough to take direction from a hired Web strategy consultant. That’s money well spent.

Request for proposals rarely fill me with joy. More often than not they’re a source of confusion, business-speak and unfinished thoughts, which we have to sort through and make sense of so we can send a reasonable bid to an organization that wants a website.

But last week I received an RFP from a non-profit that may have performed a Vulcan mind-meld on Talance. It was as if they had seen our new-client questionnaire and had preemptively answered all the questions I have at this early stage of a project. It filled me with delight (because I’m sad that way), and I know that it will make the project run smoothly, no matter who they choose to build the site.

What made it so great? Here are a few stand-outs that you can incorporate in your next RFP to help your project move smoothly from inception to completion:

1. Think it through.

The clearest RFPs benefit from discussion and planning beforehand. Make sure you talk with your team to form clear ideas of what you want your website to be, and then communicate your wishes through the RFP.

2. Write clearly.

Some people think “RFP” and pull out their cryptic businessese thesaurus so they can load it with fancy words nobody really gets. Pretend you’re explaining what you want to an idiot. Trust us, we Web developers get more out of it that way.

3. Plan your objectives.

You cannot hope for a site that reaches your goals unless you know what they are before you begin. If you want to be the go-to guide for volunteering opportunities, write it down and make sure that every decision you make from that point forward feeds back into that goal.

4. Order your objectives.

Some objectives are must-haves, others are nice-to-haves. Rank yours.

5. Go window shopping.

Everyone has seen sites they love, whether they be your competition or a mega-commercial site like Amazon. Start keeping track of sites you like, and make notes on what you like about them.

6. Know your branding.

Unless they’re new, most organizations have gone through some kind of branding exercise in the past, where colors, logos and other standards were developed. If you’re not aware of what these standards are, start asking around. We just had to redesign a website whose colors and logo were completely wrong in an earlier version, because no one checked. Translation: expensive.

7. Name your widgets.

If you want any special functionality, like slideshows, animations, photo galleries – anything – write it down.

8. Technical needs.

If you’re bound to maintain your website in a particular format, you like a CMS like Drupal or you don’t have the staff bandwidth to do updates, cite these constraints. Also note if you need Web hosting.

9. Name your budget.

I know, I know. You don’t want to come right out and say how much you want to spend, but your Web developer really needs at least a ballpark. We receive calls from clients who have $400 to spend, and those who have $40,000 to spend. We can’t help everyone, but it saves everybody a lot of time if I can tell them up front whether we can or not.

10. Make a schedule.

Decide when you’ll accept RFP questions, submissions and make decisions. Also note any ideal launch dates.

11. Contact information.

Sounds elementary, but make sure your prospects know how to reach you if they have questions. We received a bizarre system-generated RFP a couple weeks ago that had no personal contact information and was so hard to read we couldn’t even consider responding.

Laying this groundwork is incredibly useful for Web development companies like ours, but your staff will also thank you if you take the time to plan. Bonus: your funders will love you for eliminating money-wasting mistakes early on.

[Photo credit: WinTrash by fabiux, on Flickr]

If ever there was a time to feel sorry for trash cans, now is it. I know we’ve been kicking them a fair amount at Talance HQ, and certainly our clients are. What’s unleashed this sudden aggression on the waste bins by our desks? Internet Explorer 8.

With existing websites, there’s always a lag between when a new Web browser comes out and when you can get all the kinks and wrinkles ironed out so your site displays accurately everywhere.

But there’s an added problem when new versions of browsers debut. They’re inevitably buggy and have all kinds of problems that are yet to be discovered. That takes time. Internet Explorer 8 has made so many changes with the way it renders webpages that it could take a very, very long time to iron out problems. Recognizing all the problems that people are having with IE8, Microsoft added the Compatibility View button, which (in theory) lets you switch back to IE7 if a website isn’t displaying correctly.

This is a good reason for Web users – like you – to put off downloading any new browser software until some of these problems have been discovered and fixed, but it’s still a problem when it comes to website building.

What’s the solution? Well, nothing really good. Largely, you’ll have to wait until problems in IE8 are fixed and ask your Web developers to start taking a look at your site to make sure it appears correctly in the new browser. Just be patient, take your time and look at it as a reason to refresh your website.

Most organizations will spend most of their time designing and maintaining their website’s homepage. And that’s fine. You don’t want to neglect what’s there – the majority of your website’s visitors will see this page before any other.

But thanks to the social media functionality that makes it easy to share individual pages, such as to an event you’re putting on or the bio of someone on your site, it’s increasingly likely that a visitor might use Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon or Facebook to sneak in around the homepage.

Make sure you think of every page as a potential entry point for website visitors. This means that you may have to adapt internal pages so they make sense to a visitor. From every page, make sure a visitor

• Can access your menus
• Can easily contact you
• Knows they’re on your site – make every page harmonious with every other one

As a test, choose any page at random, and see if you can flow through your site without thinking too hard. Did you know what to do next? If not, jot down what confused you, and make sure you fix it.

1. Contact information – on the homepage. This includes mailng address, phone number, e-mail address and fax number.
2. Directions. This includes a map (like a Google map), parking information and public transport options. Do you provide transport services? Include info on this here too.
3. Service times. keep this up to date with candle-lighting times and special, high holy day services. In text, on the homepage.
4. Rabbi’s blog. If there are two things rabbis do well, it’s think and write. They should be blogging machines. If you’re thinking, “But I can’t get the rabbi to blog!” have him or her send you an e-mail every week with their thoughts, and you do a cut-and-paste job. Bonus points if you put the most recent blog posts on the homepage.
5. Extra blog for special projects. This is especially for long-term projects you want to inform your members of, like renovations, new programs or campaigns like Save Darfur. Yes, start a second blog for these things. That way you don’t cloud the focus of the rabbi’s blog.
6. Pictures – OF PEOPLE. If you have to show a picture of a room, make somebody stand in it. Better if multiple people are standing in it. If you can’t take pictures during services, provide arty shots of architectural highlights.
7. A calendar. Keep it up to date. Bonus points if you put the week’s events or a date-picker on the homepage.
8. A way to give. Do not be shy. Do not make it hard for people to figure out how to give. They want to help you out. Let them.
9. Calls to action. Tell your visitors what they should do when they arrive at your site. if you want donations, say, “Donate now!” If you want them to subscribe to the blog, say, “Subscribe to the blog!” If you want them to come to an event, say, “Sign up for our next event!” Get the picture?
10. A special section for potential members. Your regular Joes know what you’re all about, but your new people need special guidance. Put all the stuff they need – like directions, membership forms, rabbi’s profile – in one handy spot so they can pick it up when they come. Label it clearly, “Visitors: Click Here.”
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[Photo credit: Adopt a Pet, Live Longer! by sayheypatrick, on Flickr]

You may already have a Donate page on your website where you make it possible (and easy) for people to support you. But how many people click through to your Donate page compared to other pages of your site? I’m willing to make the sad bet it’s not at the top of the list.

Some pages, though, are stars. They consistently receive more visitors than other pages. This might be the Dog of the Week adoption page or your contact information page. People either love or need what’s there, so they come back, day after day.

While you should stay true to the main focus of these pages, start to think of them as a way to reach out to potential donors by putting a call to donate on these busiest pages of your site.

To find which pages pull in the droves, tap your Web analytics service, such as Clicky or Google Analytics. Most have a section that lists the top 10 or more pages in terms of traffic. Pick the top pages from this list and ask people to support there.

It helps if you can elegantly work in the plea for funds with the focus of the page. If it’s the Homeless Dog of the Week page, for instance, you may want to include something like:

“Can’t take Buster home? Support him and his doggy friends by donating $20 right now by clicking here.”

That’s it. Stand back, keep checking your traffic and donation box, and see if your income doesn’t increase. Make sure to come back and tell us how it went.

Getting your website to work for you doesn’t have to mean a complete overhaul. Here are five small updates you can make without suffering.

1. Add a feedback form

One of the very best ways to get more use out of your website is to give its visitors a way to interact. If you add a contact form to your contact page (here’s an example), you’ll open up opportunities for accepting comments. It’s welcoming, will help limit spam, and can increase the amount of feedback you receive from your site. A pretty big payoff for something so small.

2. Make menus consistent

Clicking through the pages of your site should not cause motion sickness. Yet some websites have inconsistent navigational menus. Sometimes they actually jump around. Sometimes the options change. Sometimes they don’t even work. Make them consistent and reliable, and you’ll find more people will be clicking around.

3. Limit what’s on your homepage

You wouldn’t stuff all your house’s furniture into the foyer, would you? Same thing with all the content on your website. Put your front-page stories on the homepage, and tuck the rest of the information where it logically belongs.

4. Add some links to and from your social networking accounts

Many organizations have well-used Facebook, MySpace or Twitter accounts, but you’d never know it from the website. Do some cross-linking, and add some links on your site. (Note: Join for the Talance Facebook Fan Club, and we’ll give you some lovely social media icons.) People can learn more about what you do, and they can subscribe to your accounts and receive updates and reminders.

5. Launch a blog or microblog

Even if you update it just once a week, a blog is a great add-on to a website. It increases your chances of telling the world what makes you so great, and it keeps people coming back for more.