About half of the traffic to our website comes from search engines (like Google, Yahoo! and Bing).

That is, users search for terms, results from our site are listed along with a whole load of other sites, and they choose to click on our link to enter our site.

The higher our website's result is on the list, the more likely it is that the user will click on it.

How important is this? Think - if someone has Googled "sponsor a child", there are multiple not-for-profits whose names can appear. We want to be at the top.

Websites with the best content that's most relevant to the reader, as judged by the search engine, will be listed higher than others.

In other words, if we create great content written and structured in a way that shows its relevance to the topic, we will get more traffic to our website.

Lee Odden puts it nicely:

Use the words that matter most to your customers in titles, links and body copy to inform and inspire them to take action. Text used in titles should make it easy for readers to understand the topic of the page quickly, in the first few words. Text used to link from one page to another should give the reader an idea of what they'll find on the destination page. A consistent approach to titling, labeling and copy in web page text, image annotations, video descriptions and links will create confidence for the reader in the subject matter and inspire sales.

Lee Odden, 2012 Optimize: How to attract and engage more customers by integrating SEO, social media, and content marketing, John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken, New Jersey.

So write content that your readers want in a way they want to consume it:

• Use the words your reader would expect, and might search for. These are called "keywords" in SEO speak.
• Create a clear, accurate, engaging headline.
• Break up the text with sub-headings that clearly describe their section's content.
• Avoid writing about web actions (‘click here', ‘go to the ... page') or the structure of your writing (‘the following list', ‘the home page'). This makes your text shorter and allows the key messages to shine through. For example, rather than "To join Team World Vision, click here", use "Join Team World Vision".
• Create links from your page to other, quality web pages with related content, and vice versa.
• Give accurate, descriptive names to your images, videos and other content.
• Create titles and descriptions for your pages that work well as short, sweet search results.
• And, where you have this control, create a web address that makes sense to a human.

That's a pretty good start to SEO.

What words might users search for?

Using the words that readers might search for can help people find our site. But which words are searched for most often?

Google Trends can help you find out which terms are more popular. Just enter comparable words, separated by commas, and you'll see how popular each of those terms were over the recent past.

Once you have the initial results, you can easily limit them to those from Australia.

For example, a search for "sponsor a child" versus "child sponsorship" shows that Australian online users are twice as likely to search for the former.

So you might decide to use the headline "What happens when you sponsor a child" rather than "How child sponsorship works" - as long as it conveyed the right meaning.

Regarding PDF files and documents

PDF files and documents require specific treatment so that they work optimally on the website.

When naming the file:

• use descriptive words that your user might search for;
• use lower-case letters, digits and hyphens only - no spaces or symbols; and
• use hyphens (not underscores and certainly not spaces) to separate the words.

For example, not "ChocolateScorecard FINAL Aug 2012.pdf" but "fairtrade-chocolate-ratings-2012.pdf".

Include basic metadata, such as description/subject, keywords, and especially title. These can be set during the document creation (eg in Word's file properties) or can be included in PDFs through the use of Adobe Acrobat.

Inside the document, include a link back to World Vision Australia's home page so that users coming from anywhere can get to the parent website.

Optimise the file for the web to reduce the time to download.

• "The beginners guide to SEO", by SEOmoz, 2012
• "Webmaster guidelines: Best practices to help Google find, crawl, and index your site", by Google, 2012
• "Search engine optimisation starter guide", (PDF) by Google, 2010
• "Google Webmasters", YouTube channel