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SEO for Charities
Most webmasters and search engine optimizers would believe that doing internet marketing and SEO for a nonprofit or a charity would be the same as any other client, and for the most part they would be correct. The site needs to be aged, have a lot of content, fresh updates, proper on-page SEO, and have a lot of strong and relevant backlinks. One key thing that a lot of SEO firms overlook is the people-oriented side of things on the hunt for strong backlinks.
Anyone that has ever done SEO for industries like pharmaceuticals, gambling, or warez knows that links are a lot harder to come by because webmasters for other sites do not want to link to these types of sites for fear of getting penalties for linking to bad neighborhoods. This in turn leads these types of industries to need to go out and fetch links in a more grey/blackhat manner generally.
Well, with charities the effect is quite the opposite and compounded. People love charities and nonprofit organizations much more than general business and ecommerce websites, so they are much more obliged to link to them. I have seen countless organizations such as United Way leverage their strong interpersonal relationships with webmasters to build up their backlink portfolio. To use Ghandi’s famous quote, “if you don’t ask, you don’t get” applies directly to charities looking to grow their search engine rankings. They have tons of fan sites and tons of supporters who have blogs and websites of their own, and if they are donating to your cause then a majority of them certainly would have no problem sending you a little link love as well if you ask for it.