Charity / Donation - Website and SEO

[itrogers]

I have a prospective client looking to do SEO- they are a charity and have a fixed one time budget. (The budget is surprisingly high) They are looking to have their site ranked for "charities in (our city)" and "dental charities" and any keyword variations. Adwords shows significant search volume and ranking difficulty is moderate per SEOmoz keyword difficulty tool. On page will be fairly simple and well handled, but am looking more towards the authority and link building.

I am going to tackle 3 top quality directories, Yahoo, BOTW, and Business.com (as well as DMOZ but i've never had luck). But was wondering if there were any other nationally recognized sources that mozzers know about that would be a good place to start to get some links to the site. The organization is a clinic that provides free dental work to veterans.

I have never handled SEO for a charity before, and my first instinct is that getting a link to the site will be much easier to get than if I ask them to give money to the foundation, so they would be glad to do it. Any other guidance would be appreciated. And I can give more details if necessary.

Any other tips and insight would be appreciated.

Thank you!

Ian

[EGOL]

Lots of universities have a veterans association or a page where veterans benefits are posted.  You can try queries like this one for Stanford to identify potential link pages.

[itrogers]

EGOL-

Thank you for your awesome input. Didn't realize I was sitting on that...you are awesome!

[EGOL]

Would love a .edu for this one.

<cite>West Point  and all of the other military academies.... Go  for the ALUMNI pages.</cite>

[EGOL]

"The organization is a clinic that provides free dental work to veterans."

You are sitting on a link gold mine!

I would get out there asking for links from any organization who might be a beneficiary.  You could get links from a wide variety of ....

.mil domains

.gov domains

.org domains

veterans groups - every legion and amvets group on the planet should jump their webmaster to get a link up for you.

every dentist who has vet patients who would like some help should have a link up to you.

duh... I could go on and on but you get the idea... any group associated with veterans should be linking to you

[itrogers]

Thank you both! I will definitely use to connections that they have already to get those sites and associates to point a link to the site. They also do the clinic work on campus so I'm sure the university will provide a link with the right leverage. Would love a .edu for this one. Thanks guys!

[UMoveFree]

Is it dental related? See if you can find a few dental schools that would link to the charity with the right anchor text. Lisa is on the money, start with board members that are alumni.

Do they do any fundraisers? Anything interesting or fun? Talk about it and find places to talk about it for you. News loves heart-warming 'fluff' pieces even on the web.

Thought about an infographic? May not get anchor text value, but it could get some good in-bound juice.

Are they a big authority on anything? Do they have a weekly newsletter etc..? publish that to Issuu.com and slideshare.com

Have you looked at comprable charities across the nation? maybe some good links buried in their profiles.

[lhc67]

Hi, Ian-

Additional Ideas:

Write a press release & distribute it.

http://www.thecharitydirectory.org/ & other "Charity" directories

Social Media - Use social media to help get the word out about your cause. Use iFrames to setup a nice Facebook page that goes to your donation form.

Leverage the Board's relationships. For example, are any of them members of ADA, dentists at a clinic, alumni, etc.

Get do-follow social bookmarking links.

Create a nice looking logo with well-optimized anchor text, attributes, etc and ask for links.

Good luck!!

LHC