Search engine optimization (SEO) is key to gaining visibility online and showcasing your nonprofit's work. Blog articles play a major role in that visibility — they bring fresh content to the web and keep your site active. Pair that with the right SEO settings, and you'll significantly improve your chances of ranking well in search results.
This article walks you through the SEO options available for blog articles:
To access your blog articles, go to: Website > Blog Pages > Manage
Formatting best practices
Use text formatting options
You can use headings, subheadings, and body text. Each of these maps to a different HTML tag in the page's code (<h1>, <h2>, <h3> for headings, and <p> for body text).
Without going too deep into the technical details, proper formatting matters because it signals to search engine crawlers that your page is clearly structured. It's a simple habit that can meaningfully boost your SEO — so don't skip it!
Fill in your image alt text
ALT stands for Alternative Text. It gives search engines a description of your image, which helps with both indexing and SEO. The process for adding alt text to blog articles is slightly different from doing so on custom pages.
💡 Good alt text is short (under 120 characters) and describes the image.
The first step is to add an image using the image block:
Once the image is added, click on it and the image tag will appear at the bottom of the editor.
Clicking on [img> opens the window shown below, where you can enter the image's alt text. You can update the default "Name" and "Value" fields.
Make sure to use alt as the attribute name so search engines can recognize it. Here's what the final result looks like on your article page (with the underlying page code):
The cover image or photo uses the article title as its alt text by default. This cannot be changed. However, you can edit the article title or swap out the cover photo.
SEO options
Articles include built-in SEO assistance to help your articles — and your site as a whole — rank higher in search results.
You'll find these options at the bottom of the page when editing an article:
Search engine title
This is the equivalent of the meta-title tag. In plain terms, it's what appears in search engine results and in the browser tab at the top of your page.
By default, this field is set to: [Article Title] | [Nonprofit Name].
You're free to customize it. As a general rule, keep it to 70 characters maximum — a character counter is available as you type.
Article summary
This is the equivalent of the meta-description tag. By default, it pulls the first 160 characters of the article, which can sometimes be out of context. We recommend writing a concise summary that makes sense on its own when read by search engine crawlers.
This summary also appears on the page that lists all your articles:
The summary should be 160 characters maximum. A character counter is available here as well. If you exceed 160 characters, the summary will be truncated with "...".
URL of the original content
This is especially important if you tend to copy and paste content from the web. If you publish copied content without attribution, search engines won't treat it as original and it won't rank well.
Worse still, it can actively hurt your SEO.
So if you do use existing content, always include the source URL to avoid any negative impact on your site's SEO.
External links
Finally, outbound links matter. If you cite sources or co-write an article with another nonprofit, make sure to link to their websites.
Likewise, it's good practice to ask those sources to mention you — and, more importantly, to link back to your site whenever possible.
Go further
To learn more about SEO for custom pages in Springly, check out this article.
To deepen your knowledge of SEO, check out these articles on our blog:
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