What can this charity site do to improve SEO?

[Phibnax]

Hello wise ones,

We have been working with the charity Volunteers of America to create a new site for their car donation program at carshelpingpeople.org

They are a national charity with extensive local programs run by regional affiliates, so the site is divided into a small national section linked to Regional Affiliate sections. You get to the regional sections either by entering your zip code or clicking on your state in the bottom nav of the national pages. Right now we have developed regional sections for Michigan, Nevada, Maryland, Washington D.C., New Jersey, Delaware and the Philadelphia area.

The site is about 2 1/2 months old, and while our conversion rate is pretty good (7%) our organic search ranking isn't improving as quickly as we'd like to see. Car donation is a very competitive space, and we would appreciate any advice on how to improve the SEO of the site.

Thanks so much.

[evolvingSEO]

Hi Steve

The best place to begin is keyword research. What are the exact terms you're trying to rank for? Use the adwords keyword tool and SEOmoz keyword difficulty tool to find out what's best to target. Then see how you're ranking for those keywords already, and seek to improve only the ones that;

• have good amount of search volume (use exact match, not broad)

• you feel you can rank for fairly easily (then you can move on to harder ones)

• offer transactional intent - aka the keyword types insinuates a desire to use your services

To optimize:

1. Look at your website technically and make sure it can be crawled by the engines. Run the site through a variety of tools like Xenu Link Slueth, or the SEOmoz crawler in the campaigns, or check google webmaster tools for errors.

2. Optimize your website for those keywords.  You can use the on-page optimization tool at SEOmoz.

3. Then look at backlinks, and aim to acquire high value, legitimate links.

You should also check out the beginners guide to seo and the resources here

-Dan

[Phibnax]

Hey thanks Dan!

That's good advice about the keyword research. We did that and every page of the site is optimized for one or two strong keyword phrases - we chose both high KEI phrases from Wordtracker, and high volume Google search phrases.

We have H tags and image tags on every page as well, and have kept the content at at least 500 words of quality original content on every page we can.

I haven't tested the on page optimization tool at SEO Moz, but will check it out.

I think we employed most best practices for our on page SEO. Our linking is just getting off the ground, though.

• Steve