Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your website’s content and structure to improve its visibility in search engine results. Quality SEO practices help ensure that people searching for information related to your nonprofit can find your website easily.
At Cornershop Creative, we install the Yoast SEO plugin on all client websites to provide an easy way to optimize pages and posts for search engines. Yoast SEO is a popular WordPress plugin that lets you easily add keywords, meta descriptions, and structured data, all essential SEO elements that improve how your content appears in search results.
The plugin includes tools for keyword optimization, readability analysis, social media previews, and XML sitemaps, making it a comprehensive solution for managing on-page and technical SEO. With Yoast, even those with minimal SEO knowledge can make meaningful improvements to their site’s search engine ranking.
However, SEO requires an ongoing effort! This guide provides practical SEO tips to maintain and improve your site’s search performance and recommends official Yoast documentation for detailed plugin usage.
SEO Best Practices for Nonprofit Websites
1. Choose the Right Keywords
Think about what terms people might search for to find your organization.
Use a mix of broad and specific keywords (e.g., “climate change nonprofit” vs. “donate to climate change advocacy”).
Incorporate these keywords naturally in page titles, headings, and content.
Be careful to avoid “keyword stuffing” by trying to use your keyword everywhere! Create content that sounds natural and authentic.
Use Yoast’s Focus Keyphrase feature to track keyword usage on each page.
? Yoast’s Guide to Choosing the Right Keywords
2. Optimize Page Titles, Meta Descriptions, and Slugs
Each page and post should have a clear, keyword-rich SEO title and meta description that will contribute to a search engine’s understanding of the page.
Keep SEO titles under 60 characters and meta descriptions under 160 characters to ensure full display in search results.
Yoast provides a snippet preview to help you optimize this text.
Slugs and URLs should be concise and should identify what is on the page. It is best to keep the slug between 3-5 words and the total URL between 50-60 characters.
? Yoast’s Guide to writing SEO Titles and Meta Descriptions
? Yoast’s Guide to add/edit SEO Titles and Meta Descriptions in WordPress
3. Improve Readability and Structure
Use headings (H1, H2, H3, etc.) to organize your content clearly; think of this like the outline of an essay.
Write in short paragraphs and use bullet points to make text more digestible for both the user and the search engine.
Avoid jargon—write in a way your audience will understand and use words they will expect to find on your site.
Use Yoast’s Readability Analysis to get feedback on sentence length, passive voice, and readability score.
? Cornershop’s Guide to Page Hierarchy [Note: Update link to the new website with an anchor to the correct section]
4. Optimize Images and Media
Use descriptive filenames and alt text for images to improve accessibility and SEO. This is essential for search engines and screenreaders.
Compress images to reduce page load times (a key ranking factor).
Ensure images are responsive and look good on mobile devices.
? Cornershop’s guide to alt text
5. Strengthen Internal Linking
Link to relevant pages within your own site to improve navigation and SEO.
Ensure important pages (like donation pages) are linked frequently and load quickly.
Use descriptive anchor text instead of generic phrases like "click here."
? Yoast’s Guide on how to use it’s Internal Linking tool
6. Optimize for Social Sharing
Use Yoast’s Social tab to customize how your content appears on Facebook and X (formerly Twitter).
Add high-quality images and engaging descriptions to encourage sharing.
Use Open Graph (OG) tags to control your site’s appearance on social platforms.
? Yoast’s Guide to Social Media Optimization
7. Keep Content Fresh and Relevant
Regularly update key pages (like About Us and Donation pages) to keep them relevant.
Publish blog posts or news updates to show search engines your site is active and that it is contributing quality content (one of the most important factors to Google’s search algorithm).
Repurpose old content by refreshing stats, images, and keywords.
? Cornershop’s Guide to Building Good Content [Note: Update link to the new website with an anchor to the correct section]
8. Use XML Sitemaps
Yoast automatically generates an XML sitemap, helping search engines index your content efficiently.
Make sure your important pages are included and unnecessary ones (e.g., admin pages) are excluded.
? Yoast’s Guide to XML Sitemaps
What If You’re Not Seeing All Yoast Features?
Sometimes, certain features of Yoast SEO may not be visible or enabled on your site. We may have disabled some advanced or resource-intensive features to improve website performance and reduce clutter in the WordPress admin panel. If you’re missing a feature you’d like to use, you can manually enable it in the Yoast Settings panel.
Common features that may be disabled include:
SEO Analysis – Provides insights into how well your content is optimized for search engines.
Readability Analysis – Helps assess and improve the readability of your content.
Cornerstone Content – Marks key articles as important for internal linking.
Ryte Integration – Checks whether your site is indexable by search engines.
To enable or disable features, navigate to Yoast SEO > Settings in your WordPress dashboard or send a request to our support team.
Your Next Steps
Cornershop has installed and activated the Yoast SEO plugin for all our client sites. In all sites that we build, we also:
Enable and configure the XML sitemap to include the appropriate post types, and exclude the ones that shouldn’t appear in search results
Setup default SEO Titles and Meta Descriptions for all the post types included in your XML Sitemap
Toggled on or off the features of Yoast we think are of the most value to you.
Note: There are plenty of other things we do as a part of our site build processes, such as crawl your site for 404 errors, review the HTML markup, optimize page performance, fine-tune analytics, and audit your site for potential issues — the above lists just what we do with Yoast!
Need More Help?
SEO is an ongoing process, and while Yoast SEO provides great tools, success depends on consistent efforts. If you need additional guidance, explore Yoast’s Help Center or reach out to us at Cornershop Creative for tailored SEO support and guidance.
If you’re considering Yoast Premium, this plugin offers extra features like automatic redirects and expanded keyword analysis. However, for most nonprofits, the free version of Yoast is powerful enough to handle core SEO needs.
Have questions? Let’s chat! We’re happy to help you optimize your nonprofit website’s SEO for maximum impact.