The Google Grants blog has moved! We’ve joined forces with the Google for Nonprofits blog and will no longer be updating this page. Check out the new blog for relevant news and updates from the Google for Nonprofits Team.

Posted by Janelle Kuhlman, Google Grants Team

Cross posted on The Official Google Checkout Blog

We’re thrilled to announce that as part of the Google Checkout for Non-Profits program, free transaction processing for Google Grants recipients will be extended through 2011.

So if you’re part of the Google Grants program and you have a Google Checkout account, you’ll be able to use Google Checkout to accept donations without paying transaction processing fees in the coming year. We hope many non-profits take advantage of this benefit through the next year as they raise funds to advance their causes.

For more information about other Google tools for non-profits, check out the Google for Non-Profits website.

Posted by Satyajeet Salgar, Checkout Team

Last year we conducted our Annual Survey, which collected responses from our grantee base on a range of topics like AdWords usage, performance, marketing strategy, product adoption, organization needs and case study information.

In an effort to better understand the needs and trends of organizations within our grantee base, we also asked for NTEE codes from US grantee respondents so that we could begin to associate these needs and trends with sub-categories of the NGO industry and offer some insight into the NGO industry in which your organization works.

We’re excited to be able to now share this insight with you in the form of industry benchmarks.

Over the next few months we’ll feature a series of posts that offer benchmark data for each of the NTEE categories represented within our grantee base. The benchmarks are an aggregated and averaged interpretation of the NGO categories that were well represented in the survey results. We won’t provide benchmark data for those categories that were under represented or didn’t have any results.

You can look forward to industry information like types of tracking metrics, mission objectives, marketing objectives, AdWords performance and agency usage.

We’ll begin our series with the Arts, Culture & Humanities category and continue in batches until we’ve shared benchmarks for all represented industries.

Add our blog feed to your reader to see when your industry benchmark is posted.

Posted by Jessica Vaughan, Google Grants Team

If you’re a non-profit organization who has created one or more amazing videos in the past year, we have good news for you. For the second year in a row, YouTube is teaming up with See3 Communications to present the DoGooder Nonprofit Video Awards, a celebration of the best non-profit video on the site.

Whether you created a high-definition documentary about street slums in India or shot a quirky cellphone video of rescue dogs at your animal shelter, we encourage you to submit your video at www.youtube.com/nonprofitvideoawards. We’ll award prizes like $2500 grants from the Case Foundation, Flip Cams, free admission to the Nonprofit Technology Conference, and a spotlight on the YouTube homepage to small, medium and large organizations, plus a special award for the “Best Thrifty Video”.

To give you a sense of what works, here are the finalists’ videos from last year’s competition:



The deadline to enter is March 2, 2010 and you must be a member of the YouTube Nonprofit Program at the time of judging, to enter. Good luck!

Posted by Ramya Raghavan, YouTube Team

Cross posted on the Inside AdWords Blog

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be rolling out city targeting in 12 additional countries to help you reach more customers in local markets with your AdWords campaigns. With this expansion, city targeting will now be available to AdWords advertisers in 34 countries. In addition, we’re also announcing the ability to target regions in Argentina.

The countries with new city and region targeting options in AdWords are:

Argentina (region targeting only), Austria, Brazil, China (coming soon), Colombia, Czech Republic, Finland (coming soon), Hungary (coming soon), Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Poland, South Korea, Switzerland, Ukraine

Location targeting helps you tailor your ads toward specific markets, analyze your AdWords campaigns by market, and optimize your campaigns for higher return-on-investment (ROI). Now, you can go a level deeper and optimize the performance of your AdWords campaign at the city level.

For example, let’s say your organization operates in Mexico. You conduct a campaign level analysis and learn that you’re getting more conversions from big cities, such as Mexico City, than from rural areas. Here are a few steps that you can take to optimize your AdWords campaign:

1. Run an AdWords geographic report or Analytics report to determine where your users are located and where you’re getting your most valuable traffic.

2. Adjust your campaign setup:

• Run a campaign targeting cities bringing in the most traffic and increase the bids on the keywords in that campaign to maximize your impressions in those cities.
• Consider setting up a regionally (or nationally) targeted campaign with potentially lower bids on the same keywords to capture additional traffic from outside your top-performing cities.

3. Adjust bids accordingly to optimize for the highest campaign ROI.

We hope that with the expansion of city targeting, advertisers in more countries will be able to reach their local users more effectively. Visit the AdWords Help Center to learn more about getting started with this feature.

Posted by Gordon Zhu, AdWords Team

“Time is on my side” might be true for The Rolling Stones, but probably not for the rest of us. “So much to do, so little time” is a more accurate sentiment. We never seem to have enough hours in the day to get everything done that we want to, especially within the business realm.

Managing your AdWords account is no exception. We know it requires continual management for maximium effectiveness - including adding new keywords, deleting keywords and ads that aren’t performing well, updating the account based on changes to your products, services, and landing pages, adjusting CPCs, taking advantage of new AdWords features, etc. On top of this, most non-profit organizations also have limited resources. How do you do it and do it well?

Fortunately, there are ways to make the account management process much easier and faster. Here are five features that can simplify the process:

1. Keyword Insertion

Keyword insertion dynamically inserts your keywords into your text ad(s). This allows the user to see an ad that is highly relevant to their search, which increases the chances of a click. If the keyword triggered is longer than the character limit, the default ad text you specify will show instead.

Tightly themed ad groups are always ideal, but keyword insertion is a great alternative if you don’t have time to separate each individual micro-theme. Still, all of the keywords should be fairly related to ensure success. It’s also important to ensure that all of your keywords make sense when inserted into the space at hand. That may mean deleting or separating keywords for competitive products/services, keywords with “reviews” if you don’t show comparisons, etc.

Implementation is easy - you simply place one snippet of code into your ad. See this quick guide that explains further.

2. Broad Match Modifier

Broad Match Modifier is the newest keyword match type, which is essentially a cross between broad and phrase match. It allows more search flexibility than phrase match, but more precise targeting than broad match. It’s identified by a plus (+) sign immediately proceeding any word within a keyword - and you can utilize this feature for certain words or all words within a keyword.

Words with the plus sign must appear in the actual search query, or a very similar variation. These variations include misspellings, plurals/singulars, abbreviations, ancronyms, and stemmings (like “donate” and “donation”). Unlike broad match, it does not include synonyms and related queries.

The time-savers with BMM are that you a) can safely use it as as your default match type for any new keywords, without having to worry about broad/phrase/exact, and b) avoid having to identify and add as many negative keywords to filter out unwanted traffic that broad can require.

3. Conversion Optimizer

Getting traffic to your site is half the battle; the other half is converting the traffic to the action you want them to take. Conversion tracking measures the effectiveness of your traffic, by showing which keywords lead to the important action(s) you specify on your site - a sale, lead, signup, etc.

Implementation does require some effort, but it’s well worth it. The good news is that once you have conversion tracking enabled, AdWords can do the heavy lifting through a great tool called Conversion Optimizer. This tool uses your conversion data to maximize conversions at a lower cost.

With Conversion Optimizer, you bid at either a maximum CPA (the most you’re willing to pay per conversion) or target CPA (average amount you’d like to pay per conversion). The tool automatically adjusts your cost-per-click bids for each ad auction accordingly. That means no more manual adjustment of CPCs is needed. Conversion Optimizer does the work for you.

To use this feature, you need to have at least 15 conversions recorded in the last 30 days. To activate it, go to the Campaign tab > Select campaign name > Settings tab > “Bidding Option: Edit” > “Focus on Conversions”.

4. Custom Alerts

If you find yourself continually checking the account for any unusual behavior, budget monitoring, or to make sure certain metrics are still “in the green”, try Custom Alerts. This feature notifies you when metrics fall or rise past a certain threshold that you set. For example, you can set a custom alert to notify you when you’re close to hitting your daily budget (you choose the amount). You choose whether your notifications appear within the messages section of your account, or emailed to you directly. This frees you up to pay attention to the account only as necessary.

5. Automated Rules

What happens if you take custom alerts to the next level, and not only provide alerts, but action on those alerts? You get a brand new and exciting feature called Automated Rules that takes a specific action based on the parameters you set. System-implemented changes can be made to the bids, budgets, and status of campaigns, ad groups, ads and sets of keywords.

For instance, you may use it to:

• Raise CPCs by a certain amount for all keywords that fall below position 4
• Activate ads late Sunday night for a promotion that begins the following morning
• Increase your daily budget during the weekdays when you have customer support

You can have up to 10 rules at a time. There isn’t a way to edit each rule, so just delete and create new ones as desired. And stay tuned, because new levers and options are in the works...

In general, AdWords is continually developing the platform to allow for more automation and to make your life even easier. For now, take advantage of these features. And time will start to be a little more on your side.

Posted by Carla Swiryn, AdWords Team

The AdWords system calculates a ‘Quality Score’ for each keyword in your account. It looks at a variety of factors to measure how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user’s search query. A keyword’s Quality Score updates frequently and is closely related to its performance. In fact, a Quality Score is calculated each time your keyword matches a search query or every time your keyword has the potential to trigger an ad. In general, a high Quality Score means that your keyword will trigger ads in a higher position and at a lower cost-per-click (CPC).

Viewing Your Quality Score

You can find representations of your keywords’ Quality Scores in three places: your account statistics, the Keyword Analysis field and via an account report. Please see below for details on each method.

1. To find representation of your keywords’ Quality Scores in your account statistics:
a. Sign in to your AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com.
b. Select the appropriate campaign and ad group.
c. Click the Keywords tab.
d. Click Columns at the top of the ad group table.
e. Select Quality Score from the drop-down menu.
f. Click Save when you’re finished. Each keyword’s Quality Score will be measured and displayed on a scale of 1-10.

2. To view the Keyword Analysis field for any keyword, follow these steps:
a. Sign in to your AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com.
b. Click on a campaign.
c. Click on an ad group.
d. Select the Keywords tab.
e. Click the icon in the Status column next to any keyword.

3. To view Quality Score via an account report, run a Keyword Performance report and make sure to select the Keyword Quality Score Detail checkbox. This option appears in the Add or Remove Columns section under Advanced Settings.

Moving Your Keywords & Quality Score

A keyword’s Quality Score may change after you move it to another ad group. However, the keyword’s performance history will not change. This is true regardless of whether you delete and re-add the keyword or transfer the keyword using AdWords Editor.

Here are two ways that a keyword’s Quality Score can change after moving to a new ad group:

1. A keyword’s Quality Score is influenced by its relevance to the ads in its ad group. If you move a keyword to an ad group with more relevant ads, therefore, its Quality Score may improve. Similarly, the Quality Score may decrease if the ads are less relevant. For example, if the keyword ‘camp volunteer’ is in an ad group with ads seeking volunteers for camp it is likely to have a higher Quality Score than if the keyword was in an ad group with ads promoting camp registration.

2. In addition, moving a keyword to an ad group with more relevant ads can improve a keyword’s clickthrough rate (CTR) going forward. This, over time, will improve its Quality Score.

Improving Your Quality Score

The best way to improve your keywords’ Quality Scores is by optimizing your account. This entails making sure that each of your ad groups contain descriptive ads all promoting the same thing, and that each keyword in the ad group closely relates to the ad. For more information on optimizing your account check out these tips for success and the AdWords Optimization Center.

Posted by Janelle Kuhlman, Google Grants Team

The Google Grants team would like to tell a more colorful story about the positive impact that grantees are having in the world. With this in mind, we are seeking digital photos from grantees that help tell their powerful story. The photos will be used both internally at Google and externally for marketing purposes.

If you have any photos that you would like to pass on to us, please submit your information in this form and someone from our team will reach out to you directly with next steps. Please note that not all organizations will be selected and not all photos will be used.

We look forward to hearing from you and thank you for all that you do!

Posted by Janelle Kuhlman, Google Grants Team

Did you know that every single ad you create is reviewed by Google to ensure it abides by our advertising policies? Our ad approval process ensures users see relevant ads that promote high quality content. Our support team reviews ads in the order they’re received and it typically takes one to two business days to review your ad. Submitting a high quality and compliant ad can significantly speed up the review process and get your ad up and running as soon as possible.

If you’re new grantee or a veteran, here are some best practices to understand about ad approvals. There are also a few tips to help you avoid common pitfalls we’ve seen several grantees experience over the past year. We hope these tips will be useful as you embark on new campaigns in 2011.

Ready your campaign
Make sure your ad, ad group and campaign are active. Paused or deleted ads will not be reviewed.

Ready your landing page
Make sure your ads lead to functioning landing pages. Landing pages that are under construction or result in server errors will be disapproved.

Ensure domain matching
Make sure your visible URL is the same domain as the final site you end up on. For example, if your visible URL is example.com, the final site a user should end up on when clicking your ad should be example.com. If the user ends up on differentsite.com, you are violating our Display URL policy.

Check for typos
Check for obvious typos in your URLs. Did you miss a, “.” or a, “ /”? A broken destination URL happens more often than you think.

Avoid exception requests
Submitting an exception request makes it highly likely that your ad will take more time to be reviewed. Think twice before requesting an exception and see if you can modify your ad text to avoid a potential delay or worse, a potential disapproval of your ad.

Avoid excessive capitalization

Don’t use excessive capitalization in your ad text. Common words that are capitalized and subsequently disapproved are, “FREE” or “GOOGLE ADWORDS”.

Hopefully these tips will get your ads up and running with minimal delay! If your ads can’t run due to violations of our advertising policies, you can resubmit an ad that was disapproved for another review. Simply edit and save your ad and it will go through the ad approval process again. If you continue to encounter problems, take a look at the AdWords Help Center or ask for help in the AdWords Help Forum.

Posted by Reid Yokoyama, Ads Quality Operations Team

This week we wanted to highlight a Spanish organization, AIDA, that has been a grantee for 6 months. We hope the interview with AIDA below will help non-profits gain a better understanding of the non-profit sector and online media world in Spain.


Could you briefly describe AIDA?
AIDA: AIDA (Ayuda, Intercambio y Desarrollo) stands for “Help, Exchange and Development” and is a NGO that has been working since 1999 in the development and improvement of the quality of life of some of the poorest areas in the world. Declared as a Public Utility organization in 2004, AIDA has been working on projects of economic, human and cultural development; offering its aid and services in 12 countries of Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa. The work is mainly done through cooperation projects for development and thanks to the help of several professional experts.

What are the major challenges of Spanish NGOs?
AIDA: In the last few years, the biggest challenge has been the transition to a professional sector. The ongoing process has taken place inside the institutions but has involved convincing society of the need of a more professional way of doing things.

The financial crisis is also a big issue; it has made the process of professionalism and collaboration more difficult by making access to public and private funds more challenging. This makes it difficult to maintain projects and to be able to develop them in the way they were originally stated. Altogether, it makes executing organizations’ objectives very difficult.

Which role do NGOs play in the online space?
AIDA: From our point of view, a great part of society uses online media to get information about the work and the need of NGOs. Organizations are using more and more tools online to increase the awareness of their activities, since it can be faster, cheaper and more efficient than traditional media.

How has Google Grants impacted your organization?
AIDA: In our case, Google Grants has been crucial because it has connected people looking for our service with our organization online. People interested in our services are able to reach us in a fast and easy way.

How long have you been part of Google Grants and how did you hear about the program?
AIDA: AIDA has been a member of Google Grants since July 2010. We knew about AdWords because of it’s importance in the sector of online communication and advertising. We found out about Google Grants through a volunteer of our NGO.

How has AIDA benefited from Google Grants?
AIDA: Google Grants has made it easier to find volunteers and employees for our institution and has increased both material and economic donations for our projects. We have also received several collaboration propositions, kind feedback on our activities and projects, and there has been an overall increase in awareness of our initiatives.

Could you give us a more specific example of how Google Grants has helped your NGO?
AIDA: AIDA Books & More is an online library through which we sell used books that have been donated by companies and individuals. All the collected money is then used to finance our aid projects. Thanks to our Google Grants ads, the donations to this project have increased significantly, as well as the collaboration of society to keep developing it.

Is there any other project that you would like to accomplish with Google Grants?
AIDA: It would be lovely if the Google Grants team could organize courses and workshops for NGO volunteers and employees in order to learn more about AdWords and other Google products.

Would you recommend Google Grants to other NGOs?
AIDA: Of course!

Posted by Diana Memic, Online Ad Sales Team

Writing compelling ad text is a tricky process, and it can be frustrating to receive a disapproval email after carefully constructing the perfect ad. In a previous post, Veronica introduced you to some of the policies which apply to AdWords ads. In this post, I am going to explain in a bit more detail a couple of easily made errors which can lead to your ads being disapproved when they are reviewed.

Trying to stand out
While it can be really tempting to use some SnAzZy capitalization, or punctuation (!!!) to make your ads really stand out to users, you will also bring your ad to the attention of our review team.

Submitting an ad with excessive capitalization or punctuation will lead to your ad being disapproved. So that means:
- Don’t put an exclamation mark in your title
- Make sure you only use one exclamation mark in total in each ad
- Feel free to capitalize first letters of words, but don’t capitalize every letter (unless you’re using an acronym like UNICEF).

Asking for donations?
When ads are reviewed, we don’t just look at the text, we also look at the page the user will see when they click the ad, which we often call the ad’s landing page. As a Google Grants advertiser, you may be asking for donations, and if you are, we require the landing page to make clear that donations are tax exempt.

In the US, a notice of "501(c)(3)" status will serve this purpose. In other countries, it may be making sure that your registered charity number (or the local equivalent) is on your ad’s landing page. When we come across ads that do not do this, they are disapproved under our ‘solicitation of funds’ policy.

My ad’s been disapproved, what now?
Your disapproval email will contain a link to the relevant policy in our Help Center. Take a look at the description of the policy and consider why our reviewers have decided your ad doesn’t comply with this particular policy.

When you make changes to your ad, saving the changes automatically resubmits a new ad to our specialists for review.

Posted by Dan Massey, AdWords Team

How can students hone their marketing skills and help an NGO at the same time? Sign up for the Google Online Marketing Challenge and compete for the NGO Impact Award. The Challenge is a global student competition open to any higher education institution anywhere in the world. The 2010 Challenge had over 12,000 students in 60 countries competing. This year, we would like the Challenge to reach even more people ... and we need your help in getting the word out!

For the first time ever, The Challenge will allow student teams from across the world to receive US$200 of free online advertising with Google AdWords and then work with local businesses or NGOs to create effective online marketing campaigns. Google.org will make a donation in the name of the top three winning student teams to their nonprofit partner. Prizes for the winners include:

1st place - $15,000 donation to the nonprofit partner
2nd place - $10,000 donation to the nonprofit partner
3rd place - $5,000 donation to the nonprofit partner

How can you help to get the word out? Professors or lecturers need to register on our website by mid-April in order for their student teams to participate, so contact any former or current professors you know to alert them to this great opportunity. The Academic Guide will provide professors with all the details they need to help them decide if the Challenge is right for their class. The Challenge is open to any university and any discipline around the globe, at graduate or undergraduate level. Registration is now open to professors till mid-April and students can compete from January 31st until the June 10th, 2011. Winners will be announced in July 2011.

Together, student teams and nonprofits can make a lasting impact and learn about online advertising in the process. Thank you for your support!

Posted by Kirsten Olsen Cahill, Google.org Team

There are a variety of strategies for increasing online donations, and tapping into corporate gift matching is one that holds a lot of promise but is a little harder to get at since it requires extra work on the part of the donor and involves processes that can be hard to find or difficult to follow.

One Google Grantee, Direct Relief, has started using a new strategy to help their donors easily activate their employers’ gift matching programs at checkout. Basically, when a donor begins the checkout process, they are given the option to search for their employer from the database. If a match is found, that employer’s gift matching program details are shown for the information of the donor.




Once the donor completes the donation, the process for completing the gift match is shown so that they know what to do next in order to activate the matching funds.


The process is far simpler from a donor’s perspective, and Direct Relief has kindly offered to share their experience with you so that you might be able to try this strategy for potentially doubling up each donation that comes through your online doors, too.

Soup to nuts - what was the cost and time investment to get this up and running?
Direct Relief: We purchased this module from a company called HEP Development Services in Leesburg, VA. (www.hepdata.com) The cost was less than $10,000 to purchase the module, and we contracted for multiple years. The time to implement was a few weeks with a little bit of back and forth, as we decided exactly how and where to implement it on our site.

What's the process for purchasing the module and installing it?
Direct Relief: Once you let HEP know how you want to use the module, they advise on how much it will cost and then produce the necessary code and send you a link. I built a page to host introductory content and the search box, then when a user searches their company, the results populate on a HEP-hosted page. It took some basic coding ability to implement on our site. Also, we integrated it into our online donation form, which makes it really easy and convenient for donors to use.

What process did you use for building out the company donation match database?
Direct Relief: HEP maintains the company match database, and we provided names to them to see how many of our donors have the potential to have their companies match their gift.

How much have you seen donations from company matches go up since you installed it?
Direct Relief: None yet - it takes about three to six months for matching gifts to be disbursed from most companies (installed in November 2010). We think this could increase our matching gifts by about 20%, however.

On a scale of 1-10, how helpful has this tool been for increasing donations compared to other tools you've used?
Direct Relief: So far, we'd rank it an 8. Nothing's confirmed yet, but we're very hopeful that this will encourage donors to have their gift matched because it's so easy to use.

Anything you think new users should know about it or consider before getting started?
Direct Relief: Decide how and where you want to use this functionality on your site before you get started so you can communicate exactly what you're looking for to HEP. That streamlines the process.

If you have strategies for increasing online donations that you’d like to share or just want to talk shop with other Grantees and non-profits, visit our Discussion Forum and start a conversation today.

Posted by Jessica Vaughan, Google Grants Team

We hope you've all enjoyed your holiday season and are ready to get back to AdWords in full force.

Sure, you've made all kinds of New Years resolutions already, but there's still time for one more important one... 2011 is the year to make your AdWords grant fabulous!

We'd like to show you two important resources that will help you make this New Year's resolution the easiest one on your list.

The first resource is our Google Grants Help Center. This one stop-shop of knowledge covers everything from setting up your account, to managing your bids, and even how to optimize your account to increase your rank on Google.com. The articles are organized by topics like Basics, Your Ad Performance, and Your AdWords Account so you can access them quickly. And if you can't find what you're looking for, don't fret! Just search for it at the top of any Google Grants Help Center page (we're really good with that whole search concept).

Our second resource is built by you, made for you. The Google Grants Help Forum was created with all your questions (and answers!) in mind. Can't find what you're looking for in the Help Center? Perhaps others have the same questions too, and have posted them in our forum. This is the place to ask the community of Grantees anything you'd like. Sometimes the Google Grants team provides answers, but most answers come from YOU!

Feel free to post a discussion, and see who answers in "My Discussions." If you answer many discussions, we'll show others that you're a star (!) and display the amount of discussions you've replied to on your profile. Also, if you find a discussion that particularly helps you, but can't read it 'til later, you can mark it and come back another time.

Isn't crowd sourcing the best?

So, get movin' on your easiest resolution this year and make your AdWords account the best it can be!

Happy New Year!




Posted by Andrea Cohan, AdWords Team

In November, the Benelux Google Grants team had the pleasure to welcome more than 30 different non-profit organizations at the first ever Google Grants Day in Amsterdam. The attendees were a mix of existing grantees and non-profit organizations that were new to the Grants program. The day kicked off with a series of workshops and ended on a high note with insights into different aspects of online marketing from our 3 speakers.

The workshops for our existing grantees began with a hands-on optimization session, where grantees got the chance to brainstorm with our AdWords specialists on how to maximize their Google Grant to meet their organization’s mission and goals. This was followed by a session on how to create exposure and awareness through YouTube and a workshop on how non-profit organizations can get the most valuable information out of Google Analytics.


For the organizations new to the Grants program there was a special surprise: we made sure that they would leave the Amsterdam office as the proud owners of new and shiny Google Grants accounts! During their sessions these non-profits got the chance to set up their account, get acquainted with the AdWords interface and learn all about basic optimization. Suffice to say that these new grantees left the Grants Day happily surprised and extremely content.


After these product-focused and practical workshops, the speaker sessions offered the grantees a chance to think about online marketing from a broader point of view. Topics covered by speakers from Google ranged from Search Engine Optimization and Google Webmaster tools to Google Earth Outreach and the work that Google does through Google.org such as Google Crisis Response. Then, Jeroen den Tex, Chief Marketing Officer at Red Cross the Netherlands, enlightened us with insights into how the Red Cross puts the online landscape to good use.

Following the speaker session, the grantees had the opportunity to get to know their fellow grantees while enjoying a bite to eat. We were happy to learn that our grantees found it very useful to be able to share advice and best practices with other grantees, and we hope that this will encourage valuable collaboration between non-profits in the future!

Overall, the attendees were very eager to learn more about Google Grants and Google for Non-Profits products and tools. We would like to thank all the grantees for attending and all the Googlers for helping us to make this day a huge success! We hope to repeat this in 2011!

Posted by Anne-Christine Polet, DCS Benelux

Webmaster level: Beginner

Cross Posted on the Webmaster Central Blog

In our previous post, we did some source code housekeeping -- just in time for the holidays. But once users have landed on your site, how can you make sure they’ll know how to get around?

As it turns out, easily accessible content on your site can make a big difference. Users tend to have a better experience when a site helps them find and understand its content. Having an accessible site not only empowers users, it also helps search engines understand what your site is really about.

So if you’ve resolved to boost your site’s user experience and online presence for the new year, improving your content accessibility is a great way to start. Thankfully, there are tons of features you can add to make your site more accessible. In this post, we’ll highlight three of them:

• Intuitive navigation
• Concise, descriptive anchor text for links
• Unique, accurate page titles throughout the site

Intuitive navigation

Help users avoid confusion by providing them with intuitive navigation, so that when they arrive at your site, they’ll know where to click to find the information they’re looking for.

Here are three features you can implement in order to lead your users down the right path:

• Navigational menu: Having a menu with links to the site’s most important pages is the fastest, easiest way to show users where to click next.
• Text-based links: While drop-down menus, image-based links, and animation-based links can be appealing, keep in mind that users on text-only devices and some search engines may not be able to see or understand these links. Thus, many users prefer text-based links, which are also easier for search engines to crawl and interpret.
• User-viewable site map: 59% of our submissions did not have a user-viewable site map. By providing one, you display the structure of your site and give the user easy one-click navigation. If users are having trouble finding specific pages on your site, a site map can help them find their way. Don’t send your users into the wild without a map!

Let’s explore how these features can make a site’s navigation more intuitive by looking at one of our submitted sites, Philanthropedia.

Thanks to this site’s clean navigational menu, users can find all of the site’s important pages within a few clicks. Wherever users end up on the site, they can always click on the “Home” button to return to the main page, or on any of the links in the menu to return to the site’s important subpages. Like all of the links on this site, the links in the navigational menu are text-based links, which make it easier for both search engines and users to access the site’s content. Finally, Philanthropedia has included a user-viewable site map, shown below, in case visitors are looking for a specific page not listed in the main menu.

Concise, descriptive anchor text for links

Anchor text -- the clickable text of a link -- can help users quickly decide which links they want to click on and find out more about. Meaningful anchor text makes it easier for users to navigate around your site and also helps search engines understand what the link’s destination page is about.

20% of our submissions could improve their sites by improving the anchor text used in some of their internal links. When writing anchor text, keep two things in mind:

• Be descriptive: Use words that are relevant to the destination page, avoiding generic phrases like “click here” or “article.” Make sure the user can get a snapshot of the destination page’s overall content and functionality by reading the anchor text.
• Keep it concise: Anchor text that contains a few words or a short phrase is more attractive and convenient for users to read than a sentence or paragraph-long link.

Let’s take a look at how anchor text played out in two user-submitted examples:

Organization	Anchor Text Examples	Anchor Text Behavior	User Friendliness
The Mosaic Project	Work for Mosaic Order Our Curriculum Guide Outdoor School	Active verb phrases and rich nouns accurately describe the pages that the links are pointing to.	High: Users can get an accurate idea of the content on the links’ destination pages just by reading the anchor text.
Asian Liver Center	Learn more here	Generic phrases give little insight into the pages that the links are pointing to.	Low: The anchor text is too generic and does not give users an idea of what the linked-to content is.

You can learn more about anchor text and internal linking strategies by checking out this blog post on the importance of link architecture.

Unique, accurate page titles throughout the site

Each page on your site is different, so flaunt your site’s diversity by giving a unique title to each page. Giving each page a unique title lets search engines know how that page is distinct from others within your site. In our analysis, over 28% of sites could have improved their site quality by adding unique page titles.

Let’s check out a few more examples to see what a difference unique, accurate page titles can make:

Organization	Page Title Examples	Page Title Behavior	User Friendliness
VAMS International	Upcoming Events | VAMS International Request Service | VAMS International FAQ’s | VAMS International	Concise, rich language joined with the organization’s name accurately describes the corresponding pages. The titles show how each page is unique while also acknowledging that they are all associated with one organization.	High: Each page’s content is relevant to its title, and the user can get a good idea of each page’s unique offerings and functionality.
MHCD Evaluation and Research	MHCD Evaluation and Research	This page title is too general and does not accurately describe the content on each page. The same title is used across all the pages on this site.	Low: This site contains a lot of diverse content and rich functionality; however, the uniform page titles do not convey these strengths.

Wrapping things up

We hope that this blog post has given you some ideas on how to ring in the new year with improved content accessibility, which can boost the user experience and online presence for your site.

To learn more about the features discussed here and in our previous two site clinic posts, check out our SEO Report Card and SEO Starter Guide.

This blog post wraps up our website clinic for non-profits. We send our warmest regards to all the great non-profit causes you are working on, and thanks to everyone who took the time to submit their sites and read our posts!

Posted by Jen Lee and Alexi Douvas, Search Quality Evaluation Team

Contributors: Aditya Goradia, Brandon Falls, Charlene Perez, Diara Dankert, Michael Wyszomierski, and Nelson Bradley

Webmaster Level: Beginner

Co-hosted on the Webmaster Central Blog

As the holiday season comes around, we all have a bit of housekeeping to do. This is precisely why we wanted to focus the second post in our site clinic series on cleaning up your source code. Throughout our analysis of submitted non-profit websites, we noticed some confusion about what HTML markup, or tags, to use where, and what content to place within them, both of which could have significant impact on users and how your website looks on the search results page.

Before you deck the halls, deck out your <title> elements

Out of all the submitted non-profit websites, 27% were misusing their <title> elements, which are critical in letting both Google and users know what’s important to your website. Typically, a search engine will display ~60 characters from your title element; this is valuable real estate, so you should use it! Before getting into the actual code, let’s first take a look at how a great title element from one of our submitted sites, Sharp, will appear in the search results page:

Ideally, a great <title> element will include the name of the organization, along with a descriptive tag line. Let’s take a look at some submitted examples:

Organization	<title> source code	User Friendliness	Tag Behavior
Sharp	<title>Top San Diego Doctors and Hospitals - Sharp HealthCare</title>	Best	Includes organization’s name and a descriptive tag line
Interieur	<title>Interieur 2010 - 15-24 October Kortrijk, Belgium</title>	Good	Includes the organization’s name and a non-descriptive tag line
VAMS International	<title>Visual Arts and Music for Society | VAMS International</title>	Okay	Includes only the organization’s name

If you don’t specify a <title> tag, then Google will try to create a title for you. You can probably do better than our best guess, so go for it: take control of your <title> tag! It’s a simple fix that can make a huge difference. Using specific <title> tags for your deeper URLs is also important, and we’ll address that in our next site clinic post.

Keep an eye on your description meta tags

Description meta tags weren’t being utilized to their full potential in 54% of submitted sites. These tags are often used to populate the two-line snippet provided to users in the search results page. With a solid snippet, you can get your potential readers excited and ready to learn more about your organization. Let’s take another look at a good example from among the submitted sites, Tales of Aussie Rescue:

If description meta tags are absent or not relevant, a snippet will be chosen from the page’s content automatically. If you’re lucky and have a good snippet auto-selected, keep in mind that search engines vary in the way that they select snippets, so it’s better to keep things consistent and relevant by writing a solid description meta tag.

Keep your <h> elements in their place

Another quick fix in your housekeeping is assuring your website makes proper use of heading tags. In our non-profit study, nearly 19% of submitted sites had room for improvement with heading elements. The most common problem in heading tags was the tendency to initiate headers with an <h2> or <h3> tag while not including an <h1> tag, presumably for aesthetic reasons.

Headings give you the opportunity to tell both Google and users what’s important to you and your website. The lower the number on your heading tag, the more important the text, in the eyes of Google and your users. Take advantage of that <h1> tag! If you don’t like how an <h1> tag is rendered visually, you can always alter its appearance in your CSS.

Use alt text for images

Everyone is always proud to display their family photos come holiday season, but don’t forget to tell us what they’re all about. Over 37% of analyzed sites were not making appropriate use of the image alt attribute. If used properly, this attribute can:

• Help Google understand what your image is
• Allow users on text-only browsers, with accessibility problems, or on limited devices to understand your images

Keep in mind, rich and descriptive alt text is the key here. Let’s take another look at some of our submitted sites and their alt attribute usage:

Organization	Source Code	User Friendliness	Tag Behavior
Sponsor A Puppy	<img alt="Sponsor a Puppy logo" src=...	Best: the alt text specifies the image is the organization’s main logo	Uses rich, descriptive alt text to describe images, buttons, and logos
Philanthropedia	<img alt="Logo" height=...	Good: the alt text specifies the image is a logo, but does not further describe it by the organization or its behavior	Uses non-descriptive alt text for images, buttons, and logos, or uses alt text only sporadically
Coastal Community Foundation	<img src="...”>	Not ideal: alt text not present	No use of alt text, or use of text that does not add meaning (often seen in numbering the images)

A little window shopping for your New Year’s resolution

Google has some great resources to further address best practices in your source code. For starters, you can use our HTML Suggestion Tool in Webmaster Tools. Also, it’s always a good practice to make your site accessible to all viewers.

Posted by Alexi Douvas and Jen Lee, Search Quality Team

Contributors: Aditya Goradia, Brandon Falls, Charlene Perez, Diara Dankert, Michael Wyszomierski, and Nelson Bradley