Online fundraising is a great way to raise money online quickly and easily by putting your social networks to good use for a good cause.  But did you know that with a little elbow grease, you can start to collect donations online from people you don’t know at all?

People generally agree that search is the internet’s "killer app" and that the ability to (usually) find anything you’re looking for with a few clicks is what makes the internet useful.  So how can we put the power of search to work for our online fundriasing efforts?  That’s a more complicated question that it seems at first, so we’ll do a couple of posts over the summer to help answer it. 

First online fundraising tip:  Tag your pages for better search results

What’s tagging?  Tagging is adding some keywords that help identify a web page, blog post, fundraising page, etc.  Search engines and website use tags to organize information and make it easier to find the right stuff.  For example, this post might be tageed with "tagging" and "fundraising tips" and a fundraising page might be tagged with "scleroderma" "walk-a-thon" "Pittsburgh" etc.

The best way to tag is to look at other pages and see what tags they use and borrow those, then add a few that might be unique to you.  Tags should be just one or two words to be most effective.  Most of the time, when you have tags on your page, people who click on them will get a list of other pages so tagged.  This seems scary at first since they might leave your page, but remember that you can also get visitors this way.  The best pages with the best appeals will win the most traffic.

In addition, many web sites feature "tag clouds" where all the tags are grouped in a mass with the more popular tags showing up larger.  Check out the lower left corner of the Firstgiving homepage for one. If your page has one of those tags on it, then you have a link from the Firstgiving homepage.  Seems like a good deal to me.

If you have a Firstgiving fundraising page, you can log into your account and add some tags.  It’s quick and easy, why not try it today?