Link Building for Charities?
-
Hello there! I'd like to get some advice/tips about link building for charities. I am doing an internship on SEO in a charity in London and I have Moz Pro to work with. So, I have to work on the links building but I don't know how to start, what value I can offer, etc .
Thanks!
-
You can start by building general links like Forum links or profile backlinks to make the authority of the charity page just like I did for the page of Muslim charity.
-
I don't know Google's position. However, I do have thoughts about this...
Great websites link to other great websites all of the time. If you have a great website you can feel confident about linking to another great website that links to you.... but this is usually not done by agreement, it is done for the reason of attribution [such as in a footnote or reference] or in a helpful gesture to your visitor [done instead of giving an unlinked mention because you are damn selfish or scared to link to another great website that competes in your space]. People who run great websites are too busy running a great websites and don't have time to fart around swapping links. They don't gotta do it.
I think that obvious gaming of the system isn't going to work much of the time. Google is smart enough to know that one crappy website linking to another crappy website is done to game the system. Nobody links to crappy websites, except other crappy websites who can't get a link any other way AND people who are paid to link to crappy websites.
Our practice on linking is... we only link to pages on other websites that have content that is superior in some way to the content that we have on our page.... OR.... link to pages where attribution is appropriate - much like the footnotes in wikipedia.
-
Of Course! EGOL this is another extremely solid piece of advice. I'm wishing I worked for a charity now. EVERYONE will want to publicise their giving so make sure that rather than them writing up their good work on their blog that you go over and take photos and write up the story and have that on your blog to say thanks to the business for their generous support. They will 100% want to link to it.
You need to create the content on your site though for maximum effect. It will not always get a link but it's a solid strategy because content is loved by google anyway.
EGOL can you confirm the position with linking in return for links. I read somewhere at Google that it was a problem if someone links to you and you link back to them. Because Google thinks you're just 'swapping links' and trying to game the system. So be careful that not every inbound link has another link from you back to it because you may fall foul of a sort of algorithmic penalty.
Someone else will have to confirm this is correct though as I'm not 100% sure.
-
Your organization will have at least one person who has lots of contact with lots of donors. Perhaps that person would be willing to approach them about a link. Lots of donors (though not all lf them) enjoy spreading the word about how they contributed to worthy causes (think about those photos of oversized checks in the newspaper). These folks might be willing to write an announcement (long articles not needed) about their recent gift(s) and include links to your organization. (You could offer to prepare it for them). They might also use that announcement as a press release to local newspapers, local other groups who like to publicize good works.
Also, some businesses are plagued by telephone and email solicitations from charities. We used to get several per month. They were time wasters because we can't spend time screening charities that we have never heard of. Then we placed an obvious link in the footer of our website about our charitable giving. That link goes straight to an article that says... lots of people contact us about contributions... we want to let you know that our company gives 100% of charitable giving to [name of charity]. After that link and article went live, the number of calls dropped by at least 80%, and the ones that don't notice that link and call are handled gracefully..."[thanks for calling, 100% of our support goes to [name of charity]." Charitable solicitation calls are no longer a problem because we don't get very many and the ones that we do get are easy to deal with. And, our favorite charity got a great article with an obvious link.
-
Hello guys!
Thank you very much for the useful information you all shared with me
Kind Regards,
-
Wow, lots of super helpful advice here! Thanks so much for jumping in! Tawny from Moz's Help Team here.
I also found a few links on this topic that might help, for a little further reading:
https://moz.com/ugc/charity-affiliations-and-link-bulding-how-to-get-links-while-helping-nonprofits-organizations
http://www.seodirect.org/blog/donation-links/
https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/opinion/2067425/how-market-charities-online-for-freeHope those help a bit! If you've got product support questions, feel free to give us a shout over at help@moz.com.
-
I would ignore what other people are doing. The charity sector is not always known for it's super-efficient and industry leading digital marketing activities. So although the advice that John Mondt gives is sound for many industries, he is right to include the phrase 'what's working' for them. So don't just copy their link profile or go after links before carefully analysing them for quality and their potential to be relevant in the future. I work in Dentistry and copying other dentists link profiles is more likely to land me with a penalty than take my DA anywhere special.
Charities tend to be filled with people (at the senior levels) who have pretty impressive backgrounds and CV's. Also you're in a very strong position because charities are good for the world so no matter who you contact, you're always going to be coming from a place of positivity and wanting to make the world a better place. This is huge. So I would round up everyone at your charity on the board who belongs to any university, trusted organisation, professional body or other trusted domains and reach out to them for guest posting ideas and shameless plugs of your organisation.
Link building for a non for profit is about just putting together a great pitch about how you're helping the world and then asking for help to spread the word. Don't be afraid to be totally authentic and honest about wanting to improve the visibility of your website (short of asking for links which is against the guidelines)
Hope this helps. But I was looking at a big charity just now and there are CBE's on the board, people with honorary degrees from universities and people who are members of huge and trusted organisations. So as a linkbuilder, i'd reach out to those people and put together a strategy of how to leverage those relationships to gain links. Or in this case 'do PR' as white hat linkbuilding and PR are now pretty much synonymous. (used to say not synonymous, sorry, PR and linkbuilding are the same - that's a typo)
hope this helps. PS: I love helping charities so maybe hit me up and I could help you in more detail. Obviously i'm not going to charge you but a mention from a charity website is always a great thing for us. We just did a huge campaign for international women's day that bumped our DA three clear points. Win!
-
I would start by checking the links of similar charities. That way you can see how they are building links and what is working for them. Then I would move to the Fresh Web Explorer. There you can search mentions of different phrases that have to do with your topic that the charity promotes. You can then build up your network and start reaching out/link building.
You should also check out the blog. Plenty of posts there about link building and advanced techniques. You can even go back to the YouMoz Blog and see techniques and information from back in the day. They are older posts, but still valuable information none the less.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What type of links do I need to build in the first month to my website?
What type of links do I need to build in the first month to my website?
Link Building | | Gustavostap0 -
Is there any link building value to design showcase websites?
I am interested to hear people's opinions on this. We are launching a microsite that is for branding purposes only, no real SEO strategy beyond optimizing for branded terms on it. However the design of the site is strong in my opinion. I think it could get picked up by "sites of the day" websites, showcases, galleries, etc. Would there be SEO benefit of in being featured on those sites since they tend to be curated lists of only the best sites and therefore editorial links? Or is there danger of those not being seen as quality links that could get you into trouble?
Link Building | | IrvCo_Interactive0 -
Totally puzzled by link building/content marketing
Hey Mozzers! 🙂 I'm going to be starting link building for a website soon and I am having some trouble wrapping my head around a couple of things. First of all, in the current world of SEO, where should I be looking to generate links? Is it as simple as reaching out to bloggers and trawling through competitors links? Or is there something more? In relation to this, if I were to generate a good number of links from high authority sites, how would this effect my ranking for keywords (assuming the anchor text for those links is the website URL)? The other thing I'm a little puzzled by is, if I were to write a great article on the websites blog and it gains traction in social media circles, people would (I assume) only share a link to the blog post instead of the actual article itself. How would this effect the ranking of keywords that I have optomised (anchor text etc.) for in the article? I assume this is where guest blogging would come in? Any help would be HUGELY appreciated. I've been trying to logic this one out the last couple of days and just can't do it 😕 Thanks a lot to anyone who replies 🙂
Link Building | | CD_20161 -
Should I become a regular contributor to help my SEO link building?
I've been offered the opportunity to contribute to a blog as often as I want and have a link included at the bottom of each post. Will this be much help to me in my link building SEO campaign? As I understand it more links from different root domains are what really count? So 20 links each from a different site is more valuable that 20 links from one site? Should I take up this opportunity or are my efforts best spent elsewhere?
Link Building | | SamCUK0 -
Link Building - Where to start and how long to see results
Been working a lot on on-page seo and it mistifies me to observe that when i get A's constantly for search terms for on page but im not on the first 10 pages of Google compared to a competitor on page 1 with on page reports of C, D and even E! So, a lot of hard work "on page" does not equal to a lot of hard work which is obviously link building. my domain and page authority is only 18 and 27 whereas the main competitors are 50's and 60's. Is "link building" or lack of it my main issue? Here is the site http://www.govisitthelakes.com Very new to link building 😞 Anyone know a good place to start? Ive been working through open site explorer and starting to get some of my competitors links. How long to see results from link building to improve domain and page authority? or is it just "how long is a piece of string" and be patient. Thanks Ouji
Link Building | | oujipickle0 -
Does a hashtag link pass the same amount of link juice as a link without a hashtag?
Example 1: link to: http://www.domain.com/#something-inside-the-page Example 2: link to: http://www.domain.com/
Link Building | | adriandg0 -
Directories and Link Building
I was reading a post by Eric Enge, http://www.seomoz.org/blog/role-of-directories-in-link-building and nobody talked about in the comments, so I want to see what you think: Considering that get some bad links from punished directories is bad for your site, it's worth to use site submissions softwares, like SubmitEaze, that promisses a 1,000 submits?
Link Building | | seomasterbrasil
Do you use it, what you think about it? [title edited by staff for clarity]0 -
What's your favorite link building tactic?
What's your favorite 100% white hat link building tactic? Well, maybe you don't want to reveal your favorite...just a good one...
Link Building | | AdamThompson0