Miszou wrote:
Say what you want about Google, but their Adwords program sucks for non-profit websites.
Well that's kind of the point really, it's advertising which is for profit by definition, even the red cross advertises (I still really don't know why to be honest and it kind of disgusts me that they are taking money from people and buying expensive tv advertising) and they must turn a profit to pay for it. One thing we've always done is make sure that our page is optimized for our key search terms that we know bring the people who are looking for what we make in so that we are not 100% reliant on adwords. A good balance is 80-20 if you can get it, i.e. 80% people coming in based on the keyword matching and content on your site with the other 20% to cover people searching in unique ways via ad-words. Quickly looking at your page you linked to you have a serious design issue if you want people to find your site through regular searching, you have the whole encyclopedia thrown into your meta tag keywords and almost none of that text appears on your page at all which is going to hammer you with search engines. Take a moment to write a nice succint 3 sentence description of your web site and what it offers using as few words as possible but still keeping legitimate sentences. Make sure that your keywords meta tag contains those terms that are highly relevant in your short description. Make sure your page is getting trawled by google and others. Then carefully examine your web logs for people incoming from search requests, look at what keywords they are using, you will see that they use a combination of some of your words and some of theirs that don't appear on your page. Keep a list of those other words, see how many different people use them, if they are relevant and widely used, work them into your three sentence description, toss out the words that no one ever uses in your three sentence description etc etc. This is an iterative process like weeding a garden, if you keep at it you will end up with a very high ranking on search engines and a lot more traffic of highly relevant hits. Doing this I gurantee you will find that people are using words you never thought of and quite commonly. For example our company makes "work order software" but after examining our web logs we found that much of the world outside north america refers to the same thing as "service order software", not our target market directly, but it doesn't hurt to
