Non-Profit Tech Blog

I’ve started working with more and more WordPress-based nonprofit Web sites such as those at asianamericansforobama.com and apaforprogress.org, stepping in after the site has been set up. What follows is a checklist of common errors that I’ve seen that you can use with your site designer if your non-profit is creating a WordPress site. It should also serve as a follow-up to my previous article recommending WordPress for nonprofits. Many of these items are generic to Web sites in general but WordPress sites especially suffer when these things aren’t done. Some of these issues are very detailed but that’s just the way it works when you’re looking to optimize your site. If you don’t understand what I’m talking about, just forward this list to your local Web guru and make sure they check off on every item.

Use Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools is a suite of Web apps designed to help you optimize your site for the Google search engine. It is imperative that you learn to use these tools if you want to improve your site’s pagerank. It also has a lot of good web housekeeping tools to keep your site in good condition. Google will actually help you find broken links on your site and fix them, optimize search results for your site as well as giving you feedback on how Google spiders are searching through your site.

Install a Google sitemap builder plugin like Google XML Sitemaps. You MUST use a sitemaps plugin. Also, make sure that if you are using Google XML Sitemaps to ensure that your Yahoo API key is entered so that Yahoo can be notified that you’ve updated your sitemaps. You need sitemaps made available to Google so that Google can properly index your Website. This allows Google to show your URLs like this (Google calls them sitelinks):

instead of like this:

Google sitelinks are much better for people perusing search results than the old way of showing links for your site. Even better, you can block Google from using particular sitelinks by going to Google Webmaster Tools and blocking that URL. While you can’t add your own particular custom URLs to sitelinks, you can effectively filter out sitelinks you don’t want your users to access if you have a particular niche you’re looking to target.

Just for looks

Install WordPress in root. Otherwise, you’ll end up with a site whose URL will look like www.yoursite.org/wordpress. It also means you’ll need to create a redirect in .htaccess just to have your users, go to your WordPress site. Personally, I think the /wordpress thing is kinda ugly and just allows spammers to know you’re a WordPress site and just key in on your site even easier. This is not to make your site more secure as any hacker will still be able to figure you’re using a WordPress site fairly quickly even if you did install in root. However, I don’t like simply capitulating to script kiddies on the web so quickly. If you’re going to use non-Wordpress websites in conjunction with your WordPress site, why not just set up another server and call it using another subdomain name like members.yoursite.org or yourapp.yoursite.org?

If you’re moving your /wordpress directory, you’ll need to redirect traffic back to your new root directory. You can either use .htaccess or this redirection plugin. Be aware that this plugin sometimes increases your memory overhead. Under high load, you will probably need to increase the amount of memory available to WordPress by tweaking your .htaccess file and adding this line to it: “php_value memory_limit 128M”.  However, this plugin is very easy to use if you know how to use Apache’s mod_rewrite. This plugin is also great if you’re moving a site over from Typepad to WordPress as it allows for the easy conversion of previous URLs to WordPress’ custom permalinks structure which I’ll talk about next.

Basic SEO techniques

Use permalinks properly. If your permalink URLs end in “?p=350″ or some other incomprehensible WordPress-inspired gobbledygook, please change it so that it reads properly to humans and to Google robots indexing your site. Go into your WordPress admin panel and click on “Settings” and then on “Permalinks”. In the custom structure field, type “/%postname%”. That’s it. Now your URLs will now look nice, like the permalink for this article – “http://www.nonprofittechblog.org/how-to-set-up-wordpress-for-your-non-profit“. Also, this is a great SEO technique and Google will now index this page using the words in the permalink. It’s a crucial component of getting higher Pagerank for your site in general.

Make sure you “own” keywords in your niche by writing about the same thing multiple times. At the same time, use this plugin: All in One SEO Pack. Here’s an example. Go to http://www.nonprofittechblog.org/telecoms-sans-frontieres%E2%80%99-works-in-the-congo. Assuming you’re using Firefox, you’ll see this for a title:

And at the same time, in Firefox’s title bar, you’ll see this (please click on it for a full image):

Notice how the two titles are different? The first title is a generic title to help Google index your article. Let’s face it, Google’s language parser is not too smart. It won’t understand idiomatic language so you basically have to remove idiomatic remarks from your article titles so that it can better index your article.

The second title is worded slightly differently and in a more idiomatic style so that readers can better understand the content of the article. All in One SEO Pack lets you specify both and avoids an error that Google Webmaster Tools will pick up. Google doesn’t like it if the title of the article and the content between the “<title>” and “</title>” tags are duplicates and will complain on Google Webmaster Tools. This allows you to get two chances to improve Google’s indexing of your new article and avoids the pain of having Google Webmaster Tools complain about duplicate title tags. Google just wants more metainformation about your article and penalizes you when it doesn’t get it.

Metrics

I’m an ardent believer in metrics-driven management and Web management is all about the metrics. I know, I know, there are a few of you out there who think that site traffic aren’t what make a nonprofit relevant. Shrug. We’ll always disagree on this. Frankly, I wouldn’t want to hire someone who didn’t use Web metrics to drive decisions about what content to promote or what tags to use. That’s just bizarre. What’s the point of writing for the Web if only a few people see it?

To that end, I recommend using Google Analytics, Quantcast , Getclicky and a server log-based tool like AW Stats or Webalizer for your metrics package.  All of these are free except for Getclicky. I really recommend the $20 a year for Getclicky.

Quantcast is great because it gives you demographic statistics on your user base and also puts you up in Quantcast’s rankings database. If you do ethnic specific Web sites, it’s a good way of understanding if you’re reaching your audience. When I volunteered on asianamericansforobama.com, no one was  sure whether or not Asian Americans were actually reaching the site and our initial Quantcast rating had only an index of 100 for the Asian Americans. That meant that the 2% of users or roughly their actual representation in the last US census were accessing the site. It’s not like that any more. Nearly three times as many Asians are looking at the site than when I first got there. That’s a good sign. There are many other demographic segments to target using Quantcast. This is important if you’re doing a niche blog or a niche nonprofit.

Google Analytics is the basic free package that everyone tends to use. This means that most people will accept your Google Analytics metrics at face value. When you tell people that you got X number of visits according to Google Analytics, people will believe you. There’s also a plug-in that does a great integration of Google Analytics with Wordpess and I’ll give you the link to it later in this article.

Getclicky is THE way to manage your site in real-time. This is absolutely critical. You will find that if your Pagerank rises high enough that people will just start hitting your site for reasons that are external to your efforts. Think of it as a kind of Google-based westerly wind that fills your site visit sails. For instance, on 12/22/2008, an article about Obama and Eugene Kang appeared on the Washington Post. Eugene Kang is a young Asian American staffer on Obama’s campaign team. Naturally, people started searching on “Eugene Kang”. asianamericansforobama.com picked up that search traffic because its pagerank gives it the second spot on search results for “Eugene Kang”. In real time, I alerted our bloggers and they posted within a day about Eugene Kang to protect the site’s Google ranking for “Eugene Kang”.

Be aware that Quantcast, Google Analytics and Getclicky can be installed by simply placing Javascript in the footer of your WordPress theme. This is the wrong way to do it. You should use appropriate WordPress plugins to install these metrics. I will list those later.

As for Webalizer and AW Stats, they give you good feedback on the bandwidth you’re using and will help you keep your costs down regarding your site as unlike Javascript-based site metrics utilities, these tools use the log files your server generates to get a better indication of which files are eating up more of your bandwidth every month.

Keeping Your Costs Down

Now that you know which files are getting the most hits, the best way to reduce the cost of hosting them is to NOT host them at your server’s ISP. My ISP charges me a $1 per extra GB of bandwidth a month. That’s expensive when you compare it to Amazon’s S3 which charges (as of 12/24/2008) $0.17 a GB for bandwidth. If your nonprofit posts a lot of movies to its site, you’ll find that your bandwidth usage will skyrocket. You can always host things on Youtube but then you’ll lose control over the file if you’re looking for good site statistics. I prefer to keep track of all file usage if it’s affordable. This means I have to store files on Amazon’s S3. Don’t worry there’s a perfect plugin for all this. It’s called Amazon S3 plugin for WordPress. It integrates beautifully and behind the scenes with WordPress so that when you upload files for use with your blog, it actually puts the file on your bucket over at S3 and serves the files from there. If you do use Amazon S3, please make sure that you keep your credit card information updated with Amazon. I forgot to do that and it stopped working for a month. I’m hoping that it comes back with my next post once they process my $0.12 bill from last month. (That’s why I forgot about it — the charges are so tiny.)

Plugins

Here are the plugins you should use to properly install Javscript-based metrics package systems Google Analytics, Quantcast and Clicky.

Quantcast Quantifier

Google Reports Plugin

Clicky WordPress Plugin

Make sure your theme has a “<?php wp_footer(); ?>” PHP line somewhere in the footer file for your WordPress theme. These plugins need that line in there somewhere to work properly. The Clicky and Quantcast plugins will disable the scripts if an administrator is logged in. That’s a clever way to make sure the site traffic you generate when you’re messing around with your WordPress site doesn’t get counted in your site statistics. Google Reports doesn’t do that but the integration with Google Analytics and WordPress is so good that I recommend installing it anyway.

More plugins I use are:

WP-Polls

AdSense-Deluxe

Audio Player WordPress plugin

Wrapping Up

As you can see, it’s sometimes a very time-consuming task to get a WordPress site up off the ground from its basic inception to something that’s actually pretty usable. The thankful thing is that most of this set-up time is incurred at the very beginning of WordPress setup. There’s tons more information I could impart but I’ll save that for later when I feel more comfortable about my work. I don’t like giving out advice that I haven’t personally gone through and tested. I suffer the pain so you don’t have to. Please feel free to leave your comments below.