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Good point. The fact that they're not listing any speakers could be a bit sketchy. Would like to learn some strategies for non-profit SEO though.

I'm thinking about hitting up my boss for a ticket:

http://www.lunametrics.com/website-traffic/seo/sf2012/

We've got plenty of bloggers lined up already. I wanted to get some feedback from folks who might have done a similar blogger challenge before, how it worked out for them, and if we weren't missing any crucial details.

Hi all,

We're just about to push out a blogger contest. We want to win for the keyword "How to make a difference"

Search volume:

Exact match: 810

Broad Match: over 300,000

These are our contest guidelines that I plan to share with interested bloggers soon:

Subject:
Follow Up: The Vittana “Make a Difference” Contest.

Hi [FIRST NAME],

Thanks for expressing interest in the blogging contest that I mentioned a couple weeks back. We’ve finalized the contest rules and we’d love to get you on board.

We were impressed by the interest that this contest has generated. Not only do we expect this contest to help over 250 students in developing countries to complete their education, but it should also drive traffic to your site as well!

PRIZES

• $200, $100 and $50 gift certificates for the 1st, 2nd and 3rd place winners.
• Badges showing the amount of loans driven by your blog post.
• ??Another idea??

CONTEST RULES:

WRITE A SHORT BLOG POST
Write a post on your blog focused on the theme “Making a Difference.” The post length is up to you but probably should be under 500 words. Some possible topics include. These posts do not have to be related to Vittana:

• How has education made a difference in your life?
• How have you used your education to make a difference in the world?
• What are, in your opinion, the best ways to make a difference?
• What are, in your opinion, the most pressing problems in the world today? What can we do about them.
• Check out the list of countries on left-hand side of Vittana’s student list. Have you been there? What are major problems facing the country? How might they be solved?
• Tell us about someone or something that had made an impact in your life.

Again, the format can be up to you, but you can check out this document (TO BE CREATED) to help get you started.

PASTE THIS TEXT AT THE BEGINNING OF YOUR POST
Please put the following text at the beginning of your blog post to mention the contest:
[Paragraphs with varying anchor text pointing to our contest page--we'll vary through mail merge]

EMAIL ME THE POST URL AND YOUR TWITTER HANDLE
In order for us to enter the contest, please send me the URL of your published blog post and your twitter handle. If you don’t have a twitter handle, we encourage you to sign up and create one for the purposes of scoring.

Important: The scoring of posts is based in part by the number of tweets that your post receives. In order for us to properly calculate your score please ensure that your username and the hashtag #makeadifference is part of the tweet.

Something like this: http://i.imgur.com/nlVij.png

In order to make this process easier, we will be sending a “tweet this!” link so that when people do share the hashtag and your twitter username is already included.

Good luck! And if you have any questions just let me know!

Kenji

I think this is probably a good bet. I don't want to discount the search engines though. We have found some keywords that seem to have healthy search volume. An example of one would be something like "Ways to fight poverty". My idea is to have a non-branded site or blog post feature Vittana (among other great non-profits). When people search for "Ways to fight poverty" they'll learn about Vittana as well.

I'd need to lobby our CEO to spend time developing these non-branded sites, however. Not sure if this is the best way to go.

Also, we're probably going to get a lot of links from a blogger contest happening soon. Would be a shame if the only links we got said "Vittana"

Thanks Sha,

Yes, we've we've been doing all those things rather well. This has sent a lot of branded links our way. The problem is no one seems to be discovering our site through search. They're almost always searching for "Vittana". That's why we're trying to identify keyword opportunities.

Kenji

Thanks Sha,

This is helpful. Hopefully we'll be able to find something from the brainstorming sessions that have high search volume that aren't too competitive.

Kenji

We're looking for ways to drive traffic to our site through targeted keywords, but because our non-profit is unique (micro-loans for students in developing countries) it is unlikely that people will be using such a keyword.

We're looking for other keywords to target searchers who might be interested in giving micro-loans for students or at least are interested in microfinance in general. Eventually we do want to win for keywords like "microfinance" but these are a little competitive for us right now.

Any suggestions/ideas?

NOTE: We're running a blogging contest soon which should be a great opportunity for links with specific anchor text.

Hi All,

Kenji Crosland here. I just joined vittana.org (yesterday!) to do some of the blogger outreach and content creation/link building.

Although most of the links we've gotten in the past are branded links, we've decided to actively pursue anchor text links with specific keywords. If you check, you'll see that vittana has a relatively high domain authority.

At the beginning of next week we'll be conducting a blogging contest with A-list celebrity tech bloggers. I don't think we'll have time to contact influencers in other areas for this contest unfortunately.

When these A-list bloggers write their posts, we want them to have a link to this page: http://www.vittana.org/students

To me, this seems a great opportunity to win on certain keywords we've discovered that should be easy to win and yet have a high volume of monthly searches. These are 5 word plus keywords that have over 300,000 searches per month.

The students page, however, isn't optimized for those keywords. In the long run we want to win for the more difficult keyword "literacy". The word "literacy" is what we think will be a part of our new tagline: "Literacy is not enough".

Because of time constraints, we won't be able to create landing pages to win for those "low hanging fruit" keywords in time for the blog contest.

My question is: to what extent should we optimize the http://www.vittana.org/students page for the five word plus low hanging fruit keywords that we've discovered. I imagine if the content isn't relevant our clickthrough rates will suffer even if we do win for it (Altering our meta description is a possibility here) . Should we just try for the difficult keyword from the get go and come up with other ways to win for the low hanging fruit keywords?

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.