  By Ted Montuori How nonprofits can network with Netizens to finish first seems that since the A.P. John Institute for Cancer Research discovered advertising online in a paid inclusion search engine, the Greenwich, Conn., nonprofit can leave radio public service announcements behind. Angelo John, the institute’s president and CEO, said the group was lucky if it received 25 calls during the two days after it was featured on a radio talk show. Now, John said, its Web site, apjohncancerinstitute.org, gets between 250,000 and 300,000 hits per month. The institute pays 10 to 17 cents for keywords on Web sites with paid inclusion, meaning it pays any time an Internet user clicks its hyperlink. Paid inclusion sites work for nonprofits, according to John, but there are others that can be used just as effectively depending on a group’s resources, budgets and goals. To make an analogy of the oft-used cliche of successful real estate investments, remember that content, content, content is key to popular Web sites. The more specific the content the better, because nonprofits can save money if a site has a niche. It is one of the search engine marketing strategies nonprofits must use to determine how fast information can be uploaded, what sites to link to, and the types of search engines that will accommodate their budgets. Not all Web search engines are free. The vast online marketing world is dominated by three types of search engines that fit different budgets. Some Web companies employ a combination of them. They are:
When keywords are typed into an algorithmic search engine such as Google, it uses a “crawler” -- ‘Net slang for the technology that analyzes how many times that keyword appears in a particular site. Nonprofits benefit from this system because their Web sites are usually information resources with extensive content, said Catherine Seda, owner of Thousand Oaks, Calif.-based Internet marketing agency Seda Communication. She made her comments during the recent Electronic Retailers Association conference in Las Vegas and in subsequent interviews with The NonProfit Times. A good example is garden.org, the site for the National Gardening Association, a nonprofit in South Burlington, Vt. In Google’s algorithmic search engine, NGA’s site places at or near the top of approximately 40 million search engine results when the generic keyword “garden” is the only thing entered. NGA’s site has many in-depth resources about gardening, as well as links to for-profit gardening companies. These criteria appeal to Google, which puts the link to garden.org toward the top of search engine results for “garden,” and past links for the Bible’s Garden of Eden, The Olive Garden restaurant chain and New Jersey’s Garden State Parkway. The NGA sells links to commercial sites, which is a smart move, according to Seda. It could be far less expensive, Seda said, for a commercial site to buy a listing on garden.org than a key word from Google, because that site ranks well for the keyword “garden.” Nonprofits can also benefit from working with commercial sites because the number of links in a commercial site will only increase its rank in an algorithmic search engine, according to Seda. There is no competition between the commercial and nonprofit sites, so a commercial site would be more likely to buy a sponsored listing on a nonprofit’s Web page. Nonprofits, Seda added, can also increase ranks by trading links with other nonprofits’ sites containing similar content. Some Web sites have directories that offer free site links, such as the Open Directory Project (dmoz.org) Dulles, Va. and Zeal (zeal.com), based in San Francisco. Yahoo offers a free listing for nonprofits. Optimizing a Web site with specific keywords is mandatory for drawing an audience. Seda recommended nonprofits pick words that will be typed in search engines and compare the number of times those keywords appear in other sites dealing with the same topic. If your nonprofit deals with wheelchair donations and other competing sites have mentioned that term 12 to 15 times in their content, keep your use of that term to approximately the same amount, according to Seda. Unnecessarily repeating the same word in your site’s content will not bring it more traffic, but instead might cause a search engine to interpret that repetition as spam and ignore the site. Seda assumes more nonprofits are placing their links in algorithmic search engines because of the increasing number of links to nonprofits’ sites she’s seen in those search results. The top five Web sites for marketing nonprofit groups, Seda said, are:
When a keyword search is performed in Google, the search engine is not examining the entire World Wide Web, but a huge index developed from previous searches and other newer sites, according to Nathan Tyler, a Google spokesperson. The index is refreshed every three to four weeks. Millions of Web pages are refreshed each day, he said. Google also offers paid ads that appear on the right side of search result pages. These ads are chosen depending on relevance of content to the keywords searched, Tyler said. The algorithmic formula is not the same in pay-for-placement search engines, such as www.overture.com, where an advertiser’s highest dollar dictates where that advertiser’s link, along with links of competing sites, will rank.Its search engine is called a Term Suggestion Tool, in which advertisers can see how many times certain keywords were queried the previous month. The more specific the term, the fewer hits it receives. This often makes specified keyword phrases cheaper to buy and targeted sites easier to market. “Buying keywords gets nonprofits less than one week to be No. 1. You just have to watch your budgets carefully,” Seda said. Another search engine in the site shows how much money was spent on those keywords, as well as the companies that bought them. For example: The term “car donations” was used 17,916 times in August. Other derivative terms that are more specialized were queried less, such as “charity car donation,” which received 1,340 clicks, and “used car donation,” which received 596 clicks during the same month. Out of all the uses containing “car donation” and its derivatives, “car donation United Way” ranked last with 25 clicks. In late September, Cordova, Calif.-based America’s Car Donation Charity Center ranked first in www.overture.com for paying $17.21 per click for “car donations,” while Charity Cars Inc. in Longwood, Fla. and Cars 4 Causes in Oxnard, Calif., tied for second when they each paid $17.20 per click. Children’s Cancer Fund of America in Knoxville, Tenn. came in third because it paid $15.50 per click for the same term. Nonprofits can benefit from this type of advertising, said Overture Senior Director of Public Relations Jennifer Stephens, because the groups create their own fees and know their rank among other sites with similar content. Unlike algorithmic search engines, which use several criteria to figure out where sites place in search results, www.overture.com and other pay-for-placement search engines use a far simpler measuring stick: The advertiser with the most money to buy a keyword is No. 1 on the search result list. Pay-for-placement search engines also accept sites with advanced Web design elements, such as JavaScript and Flash, which can be problems for achieving good rankings in algorithmic search engines, according to Seda, who said Webmasters should keep sites simple. A third method of getting your link in a search engine is through paid inclusion, which is similar to pay-for-placement in that advertisers pay to be in a search engine. With paid inclusion, however, advertisers pay per click or with a flat fee for their sites to appear randomly and not in the hierarchy pay-for-placement offers. An official at AltaVista, a business of Overture that employs a combination of the three search engine types in its site, www.altavista.com, said paid placement is cost effective because its open marketplace-like atmosphere allows advertisers to dictate their ranks depending on their budgets and marketing goals. AltaVista Senior Vice President of Marketing Fred Bullock said paid inclusion sites have a slight advantage compared to sites strictly using algorithms because content from paid inclusion sites is updated more frequently in search results compared with sites that the search engine locates. Algorithmic search engines, Bullock said, sometimes take between three to six weeks to crawl the Web and update site changes and make them visible in the search engine results. Nonprofits can potentially benefit from advertising in any of these search engines, but John from the A.P. John Institute for Cancer Research is sticking with paid inclusion, which he said is necessary “for any hope of being found” because the organization can only afford to pay pennies for keywords. In Google and other algorithmic sites, the group’s site ranks low. Optimizing a site on Google, John said, is costly and can take several months of trial and error to ensure it looks right and matches Google’s criteria. Internet-savvy people, according to John, know that the first few sites in search engine results are for-profit and can afford to rank high. Go a little a deeper into the results, John said, and nonprofits’ Web sites can be found containing other information. John said this type of listing is important for his group and other nonprofit sites affiliated with medical care because average ‘Net surfers looking for cancer information are usually online novices in a bad mindset because they probably found out a loved one – or they themselves – have cancer. Ranking as high as possible is important so these people can get information from his site instead of what John said is questionable information from other sites. Paid inclusion also works well because it allows updated content to go online within 24 hours in case a site needs to be published quickly, according to John, who said specific targeted keywords should be used so site links can be found.
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