Higher search engine rankings for your Web site

Dayton, Ohio -- At the SummitUp Social Media Confab last week, I attended a session on SEO (Search engine optimization) by Steve Phillips from Purple Trout. Steve is a genius when it comes to getting your Web site to come up higher in searches for the keywords that describe your non-profit's programs and services.

I've created dozens of non-profit Web sites and used Google Webmaster Tools (a free service) for quite a while. One feature is the ability to tell Google where the sitemap for your Website is located. (A sitemap is a list of pages of a Web site accessible to crawlers, such as Google.) Google takes the information from your sitemap and indexes your Web pages so others can find them when they do a search.. If your non-profit's Website doesn't have a sitemap, you should add one.

I had always used a text file sitemap, and had pretty good success. But Steve suggested creating an XML sitemap using a free site, such as xml-sitemaps.com. This site will produce a free XML sitemap, as long as your site doesn't have more than 500 pages. It even adds PDF files on your site, such as newsletters and brochures that you've put on your site.

I always put newsletters and brochures on a non-profit site to make it easier for potential clients and partners to quickly print the information they need. If your non-profit has client forms, those can be put on your site, too.

Because the XML sitemap included the PDF files on my site, I now have more high level search results. For example, when you search for Huffman Place, one of St. Mary Development's apartments for low-income seniors, the PDF brochure for the site is now the third search result. It wasn't there at all before I changed to an XML site map. (See the search on Google.)

So check your sitemap (or have your Web person do it.) The more people who find your Web site, the better able you'll be to accomplish your mission.