Example of Volunteer Centers using Yelp.com and Facebook

I had to share two examples of Volunteer Centers using & appearing in Web 2.0 sites. The first is of an unclaimed Volunteer Center listing on Yelp.com: If you work at the Arlington County Volunteer Center, you might want to visit the link and click on "edit business info" to claim the page.

The second example is of a Volunteer Center with a Facebook profile page. Great job the United Way of the Greater Seacoast!

Keep up the good work folks!

Who is going to be the first to join or create a volunteer Meetup.com group near you? Here are some waiting for good volunteering suggestions:

• The Chicago Volunteer Meetup Group
• Random Acts of Kindness and Nonprofit Meetup Group in Dallas, TX
• DC Volunteers -460 members at last count!
• The New York Volunteer Meetup - last count 287 members!
• Saint Louis Volunteer Group -301 members

See if there is a Volunteer Meetup near you, join and provide opportunities for the group, or create one of your own and help the members plan volunteer activities!

Getting Organized to Build Links

Stumbled Upon a great article that advocates for the use of a spreadsheet, and a color coded system to see who has linked to you, and who hasn't yet. I had to share!

Free Online Marketing Classes

Come one, come all, and learn how to adjust your web content and online opportunities to attract more volunteers!

Online Marketing 101: Can Volunteers Searching on the Internet Find You?

Learn how to drive volunteers to your website and online opportunities.

Unless you work on optimizing your Volunteer Center’s website and marketing it to search engines (Google, Yahoo, Ask.com or MSN/Live), volunteers searching the web WILL NOT FIND YOU. The steps are easy,
and you’ll leave with steps and templates to get started.

You can register for the training that works best for your schedule at the following link: https://pointsoflight.webex.com/meet/kwatier

Online Marketing 201: Benchmarking your Site, Registering with Local Search and Using Web 2.0 Communities

Have you attended the basic Search Engine Marketing Training and you're ready for more? You will learn about how you measure how effective your website is at attracting traffic (based on how well your competitors are doing), and then dive into how to register for local search engines and how you can use online communities like Facebook, Gather.com,and Craigslist.org to promote your volunteer opportunities.

You can register for the training that works best for your schedule at the following link: https://pointsoflight.webex.com/meet/kwatier

Straight from Google - Alt tag explanation

Just in case you didn't believe me when I talk about how valuable alt tags are...

SEO Basics from the Experts

For those of you who would like a crash course on the SEO/SEM basics. Learn from the experts for free!

Search Marketing - The Basics
Speaker: Detlev Johnson, SearchReturn
Event Date: December 13, 2007 01:00 PM Eastern Standard Time
Register here.

SEO, SEM, PPC, keywords, Adwords, analytics -- what does it all mean for you as a marketer when you're just starting out with search? You know you need to incorporate search into your marketing mix, but where do you begin? We'll help you get started, in this introductory webcast about search engine marketing. Industry veteran Detlev Johnson will talk about the basics, from the bottom up, so you can understand the landscape of search and how it fits into your current marketing efforts.

SEO Firefox Extension

The SEO Firefox Extension is one of the most useful online marketing tools that I've run across. It's a great way to not only determine your sites' SEO strength (based on age, number of inbound links, Alexa ranking, and other factors), but you can also snoop on your competitors based on the same factors!

You need to be using Firefox, and if you're aren't already, the Extension is well worth downloading the Firefox browser just to use the tool.

What are those Sublinks in the Google Results?

Wondering how you get Google to display your subpages in their search results?

(For an example, search for "starbucks" in Google.)

Here's a full article that explains how they get created. Briefly, they seem to be created based on an algorthym that looks at the popularity of those links, and how many internal links you have pointing to those pages.

If you're site is organized well, and you have quite a few links to subpages on your site, there is nothing that you need to know. If they are not showing up and you'd like them to be, it's time to take a look at your site's structure and time to start building links to those pages.