Well, there is a rather simple way, although it is not guaranteed to work. What you must do first when developing your website, make sure you omit any commercial references. Make sure your website is informative and not for profit. When you have your website good and ready, full of valuable content (make sure that there is no broken links and under construction pages), you can submit it for review in Yahoo! Dir. Non-commercial websites can be submitted for free. If you’re lucky and your listing is approved, just wait a little bit and update your website with whatever you held off on to retain the non-commercial appearance.

When submitting your non-profit website to Yahoo, I would suggest trying to get a link from the Open Directory Project (DMOZ) as well. Getting DMOZ to post your link is rather hard (that’s a material for another article altogether), so posting you website while it is still in the informative-non-commercial stage can increase your chances of getting your submission approved. Before you “commercialize” your site, you might want to do some research to find any other directories that give links to non-commercial websites (or are more favorable towards them) and do as much free link harvesting as you can. This approach may give you a good start with your link building efforts and jump start your website in the search engines.

Hope this short post helps you in your SEO endeavors!

- Konrad