I work for a healthcare non-profit organization (NPO) in Kansas City, KS as the project manager. As a NPO we have little funds if any for advertising, much less online advertising. So when I learned about SEO and what it could mean for us I dove in head first. First thing I did was add the meta tags (the guy before me left everything black) and began to add us to different directories online as well as searching for other sites that had us linked so I could update our information. With just over a year of doing this I’m looking into the next phase of our SEO, link building.

At first I was a little intimidated about this process. Everywhere I looked online not only revealed the difficulty of this task but the time consumption as well. I don’t have a lot of time to devote to this area so I started to think how I could minimize my time in this but still get some good results. Then I over heard a few people involved with a volunteer group at our facility talk about their recent blog posts. A light bulb went off. We have close to 2,000 volunteers a year. Now not all of them may have blogs, but I’d be willing to bet that most of them do. I approached the two volunteers to ask them if they wouldn’t mind writing a post about their experience with volunteering with us and adding a link to our site. Neither of them had a problem with it. Next I started looking at our supporters, many of which are churches. I then contacted them one at a time and all of them had no problem adding a link from their site to ours and without a required reciprocal link! The next three steps I’m planning are to:

• Ask our employees to link our site via any blogs they have, Facebook (I know its not crawled for links but visitors we get from there still count), and so on and so forth…
• Get our clinic providers to write blog posts weekly. I’ve started a Wordpress blog for them, but I will have to keep reminding them to keep it going constantly. The last thing we would want is an outdated blog.
• Finally I’m going to approach our board members about adding a link from their company websites to ours. I see this as vital because having a link from prestigious companies directing people to us would certainly help out our rankings and get some ‘weighted’ links!

Everything has just been set in motion so I really haven’t had much time to track results, but I’m looking forward to it! What I’ve learned from this experience is that SEO is, as I thought, hard work. It takes time to get results, every link helps, and you never know the answer unless you ask.

Thanks for reading!