1. Search Engines – People type in certain terms to a search engine (such as Google), and websites connected with those terms come up as search results.  Example: A person types “how can I help African children” into a search engine, and one of the pages “shoesforall.org” comes up as a result, explaining how their donation will help get shoes to African children.
2. Direct referrals from other websites – Example: Another charity which provides food to poor children has a website called food4all.org, (a made-up name at the time of this writing) which has a page with links to other charities. One of these links leads to to shoesforall.org. A person visits food4all.org, arrives to the “links” page, and clicks on the link to shoesforall.org.
3. Word of mouth and offline Advertising – This includes offline referrals, where people tell others to visit your Shoes For All website, people emailing eachother about the Shoes for All movement, people passing around business cards with URLs of shoesforall.org websites, and even notices and billboards which advertise the URLs of the websites, bumper stickers, etc.

The first method – search engines – is possibly the most important one, because of its potentials to reach anyone and everyone who might be interested in the “Shoes for All” movement (even if they have never heard of the movement before).

Your goal is to have your website come up as often as possible in search results, whenever people search for related keywords.

There will be a few main keywords that result in visits to your sites, and there will be some variations of those keywords.

For example, your sites might receive traffic from these main keywords:

A bar graph of these keywords would look like this:

If you look at the above bar graph and imagine that the blue bars represent an animal, with the head on the left and a long tail on the right.

This is where the term “long tail” comes from.

Long tail keywords are the words and terms which individually are not searched for often, but cumulatively can add up to a lot of traffic.

Long tail keywords basically include the many variations of your main keywords, which can be used to find your organization’s websites. Each variation in itself does not get a large volume of searches, but all combined, they get a considerable amount.

Sometimes when you are driving traffic to a new website, its best to start off by focusing on the long-tail keywords.  The reason for this is that they often have far less competition than your main keywords.  Once you have begun to rank well for plenty of long tail keywords, and receive good traffic from them, it is much easier to go after your main keywords.  On could say that you have your foot on the first rung of the ladder.

It’s also good to research long-tail keywords because it gives you an idea of what information people are looking for.

When people type in a search term, they are generally stating their problem. It is something they are trying to solve – whether they are trying to find out the location of the nearest pizza parlor, how to pay less taxes, or where they can find a funny video so they can forget about life for a little while!

When your website appears in the search result, it should give the solution to that problem. People may have never heard of your organization before. All they know is that they are looking for information on something, and they are trying to solve some kind of problem. If your organization has a solution, or an answer to that problem, it should come up as a result when people type in those search terms!

That seems obvious, but it is far too often overlooked.

When a person types in “charity for children,” your shoesforall.org website should be amongst the search results.  And it should also be there when they type in “shoes for children,” “help Burmese kids,” “donate to charity in Ecuador,” or whatever the case may be – providing that the organization has branches in those areas, and providing that it runs programs which help solve those problems.

In the beginning it takes work to get traffic to a website and get it up in the rankings.  By targeting long-tail keywords to start off with, you can build a stable base of traffic and start building up some momentum.  Then you can go after the big ones.

This post was originally published on Websites and Webhosting at Driving Traffic to Your Website.