by Joe Faulkner, mtm senior consultant
For many independent school marketing teams, search engine optimisation is considered something of a black art. We all know that the internet is being used more and more amongst the general public, and that being found on a Google results page is a masterful PR exercise.
However, mtm would argue that fewer school marketers are actually fully aware of how to achieve these results. In this guide we outline some key things to remember in helping your school’s website to boost its SEO.
SEO on the page
The following five aspects should be attended to in order to ensure web ‘spiders’ are finding your school’s website:
a) Page titles – these must be relevant and descriptive of your pages content. See Prospectus design for an example
b) URLs should be relevant and related to subject matter (such as www.mtmconsulting.co.uk/marketing)
c) Metadata should always be used, particularly descriptions – which show up on SERPs (search engine results pages), and keyword tags, which aid usability and may be used in future by search engine spiders.
It might help, when your school marketing team are adding information to your school’s website, to remember a basic guide: keep it clean, relevant and descriptive.
Your school's marketing strategy should include web design and SEO campaigns
Making the link
Your school website’s SEO will flourish with good use of links, and fortunately as a school you have plenty of ways to get other people linking to your site: schools guides, school business consultancies, school and education news websites, local and national media, feeder and destination schools, the list is long. Why not go on a campaign to win links to your site through other websites? And remember, the harder a link is to get, the more traffic it will send your way: one link from http://www.bbc.co.uk/ is likely to send far more traffic than 30 links on small, unknown sites.
Equally, you should provide links from your site to other websites, as long as you don’t redirect traffic (links should open in a new tab or window), and make sure that the anchor text itself is relevant and descriptive – not just ‘click here’.
Keeping your school website fresh
Finally, both Google spiders and visitors alike will be unimpressed if your site is not kept up-to-date and vibrant. Your school should ensure it is continually adding new content, news articles, photos and so on in order to maintain good SERPs listings and win new traffic. The best SEO campaign should involve regularly adding new content that is relevant to your audience, to the page, and will be read. Think to yourself, if you found this website, navigated to this article, and have made it this far, mtmconsulting must be doing something right in our own SEO. Good, relevant articles will win you an audience.
To learn more about our school website and e-marketing services please contact mtmconsulting.
