Tips and Tricks to Increase Your SEO Rating

Posted on May 10, 2017 in Associations, Feature Updates, Membership, Nonprofit

On this week’s Latest Buzz blog post we are focusing on the importance of search marketing. We look at how to improve SEO ratings and how to improve your organization’s visibility. We also look at what might be negatively affecting your websites SEO.

Web traffic is driven by the big search engines, Google, Bing and Yahoo!. It is important to have a high search engine optimization (SEO) rating so more potential members find your site opposed to your competitors! We’ve talked about SEO briefly in previous blog posts, but today we want to focus on it!

SEO Do’s and Don’ts

In the table below we outline some simple do’s and don’t that can help increase your SEO rating:

HTML Content:

To perform better in search engine listings, your most important content should be in HTML text format. Images, Flash files, Java applets, and other non-text content are often ignored by search crawlers.

Keyword Optimization:

The entire science of information retrieval is based in keywords. Use your most important and relevant keywords in links, URLs, and meta tags.

Online Forms:

Search engines are not good at filling out forms! If many of your pages are only accessible after you fill out a “signup” form, or “search” form/box they are almost impossible for search engines to find.

Double Check Your Site:

By using tools like Google's cache, SEO-browser.com, and the MozBar you can see what elements of your content are visible and indexable to the engines.

For more tips and common SEO practices check out Beginners Guide to SEO by Moz.

The Importance of Search Marketing

Change is a constant in the world of search! This is why keeping up to date with best practices and having one foot in the search marketing door is vital for visibility.

Websites compete for attention and placement in the search engines, so the more knowledge and experience an organization has with SEO marketing, the more benefits and increased visibility they will have.

A common misconception with search marketing is having instant results from doing everything listed above to improve your SEO. Unfortunately that is not the case, especially for new webpages. Ranking improvements take time as the engines not only need to crawl your pages, but index, process, and rank them.

But don’t get discouraged, the better you maintain your SEO the faster your site will be a top result on engine searches!

Responsive Design Impacts SEO

Your organization's SEO can be effected negatively if your webpage does not have a responsive design.

Google has made conscious decisions to award a higher rank to websites with:

Responsive designs, so that the website is equally useful to site visitors no matter the device.
A single domain rather than multiple domains such as having a regular site and a separate mobile site.

Mobile-responsive sites are easier for Google. It simply reduces the chances of errors with setups that are common with mobile sites.

Have a Responsive Site?

Make sure to always double check widget settings in your admin copy of Membee (Login required).

If the responsive design checkbox is not checked the widget will not appear as a responsive design. So it’s always a good idea to go into your widgets (New Member, Events, Directory, eBilling, & Profile) to make sure the box is checked ensuring your members can sail smoothly while on a mobile device!

Not Responsive? We Can Help!

If your website is not yet using a responsive design and you’re ready for it to be, look no further!

You may or may not know that Membee provides complete website development services. We develop modern, responsive, and member friendly websites only for Membee clients. With a few hundred membership websites under our belt, we know exactly what makes an effective and appealing membership site.

We offer two fixed-priced website development packages that are built in the world’s most popular content management system – WordPress

If you’re interested in learning a little bit more shoot us an email at websites@membee.com

Need Help or More Info?

Let’s get to work and get those new revenues rolling in! The link below will provide everything you need to get started using Card Vault (the document is secure so be sure to have your Membee username and password handy when you click the link).

Setting Up Your Payment Gateway

If you need any additional help don’t hesitate to contact our support team, that’s what they’re there for!

Email: support@membee.com

Chat feature on Membee’s Learning Resource page’s and on the Help from the Hive main page (Membee login required)