This document summarizes an SEO makeover project for the charity organization HelpAge.org. It provided a technical SEO review covering on-page and off-page optimization, social media strategy, and conversion rate optimization. Approximately 50% of the recommendations have been implemented so far, with one month of support remaining. Specific recommendations included simplifying the navigation, addressing issues like duplicate content and canonicalization errors, optimizing PDF documents, supporting older browsers, improving donation forms and calls to action, and adding social sharing buttons.

1. ...............................................................................................................................................................................................
EXTREME MAKEOVER
THE SEO EDITION
for charity,
mate!

2. ...............................................................................................................................................................................................
WHO ARE HELPAGE.ORG?
“HelpAge helps older people claim their rights, challenge discrimination and overcome
poverty, so that they can lead dignified, secure, active and healthy lives.”

3. ...............................................................................................................................................................................................
WHAT WE DID
A technical SEO review, covering search engine accessibility, onpage SEO, technical SEO strategy, conversion rate optimisation,
social media and content strategy
A huge document! Approximately 50% of the work is implemented, we have one month of
support remaining

5. ...............................................................................................................................................................................................
NAVIGATION
We originally recomended a dHTML / css styled drop down navigation, but these links work
just as well – increasing the number of linked to pages from the homepage

6. ...............................................................................................................................................................................................
WHAT LINKS SHOULD BE ON MY HOMEPAGE?
And…
News XML Sitemap
Compliance w/Gnews
Submission of site to Gnews

7. ...............................................................................................................................................................................................
EXCESSIVE DUPLICATION OF CONTENT VIA PAGINATED
NAVIGATION & FACETED NAVIGATION
http://www.helpage.org/blogs/search/pakistan-floods/?page=1
Check out this pagination guide: Best Practices for SEO & User Experience (SEOmoz), be
careful with rel=“canonical” and use noindex, avoid robots.txt if you can

8. ...............................................................................................................................................................................................
3) CANONICALISATION – CLASSIC ISSUE
Two identical copies of the homepage, both well linked to....
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.helpage.org/home/" />
We’ve sent a second round of feedback on this issue, indexed search pages and malformed URLs in
rel=“canonical”

9. ...............................................................................................................................................................................................
MANY PDFS ON THE SITE (300+) WITH NO HTML PAGES
People link to great resources – always consider optimising your “digital assets” – PDFs are a nightmare
for SEO – always put your content on its own page and share with others in communities such as scribd

10. ...............................................................................................................................................................................................
12% of all visits to the site use Internet Explorer 6.0. It’s an unfortunate fact that this ancient browser is
still in use in many corporate offices and homes. In Q1 2011, 1,785 people missed the sidebar on the site
due to a lack of support for this browser.

11. ...............................................................................................................................................................................................
BANNER AD: DONATIONS
Using some basic CRO principles we wireframed a new donations banner ad to test

12. ...............................................................................................................................................................................................
REMOVE STEPS IN THE DONATION PROCESS
The current donation process had 6 stages. The aim was to reduce the amount of pages and speed up the
process of form completion. The new proposed process combines the elements of the original with fewer
stages.

13. ...............................................................................................................................................................................................
BADGES AND SOCIAL CALL TO ACTIONS
Many of the interactive processes, quizzes and petitions had no further call to action for the user. Support
helpage by displaying their badge, becoming a fan, tweeting your score or sharing the donation you’ve
just made

14. ...............................................................................................................................................................................................
THANK YOU
richard@seogadget.co.uk
@richardbaxter
Thanks for listening! Check out our blog at SEOgadget.co.uk for more actionable guides and
tips – or hire us for SEO, Conversion Rate Optimisation and bespoke technology consulting.