This two part series gives your school an advantage through the power of Search Engine Optimization, resulting in more relevant traffic to your web site. Part one of the series covered the importance of good SEO, along with some ideas regarding search friendly website design. Part two includes tips, tools, and techniques for better keyword choice and placement, as well as link building strategies.

Keywords

Keywords provide search engines with an idea of what your site is about, and search engines search for the most relevant sites under any given keyword. You can optimize your site by choosing the most appropriate keywords and providing meaningful content regarding those keywords. This is where your school can gain an advantage over competing schools. The keywords you choose to optimize should be those that parents use most often when searching for a school for their children.

3 Tips for Choosing the Right Keywords

• Find keywords that are used frequently by people searching for information on schools but are not included in competing school’s websites, and optimize your site for some of those keywords. Many school websites are optimized for very general terms such as “Athletics.” While this may describe navigation within that certain site very well, parents are more likely to type in a keyword such as “youth basketball.”

• Find the most popular common keywords that most schools use and optimize your site for those keywords better then they can. This is equally as important as the above technique, but will prove to be more of a challenge.

• Incorporate some variations of a few of your common keywords. These might include misspellings, plurals, synonyms, and local place names or idioms.

Deciding on the right keywords to optimize is probably the most challenging, but also highly rewarding (traffic wise) SEO activity a school can engage in. Luckily there are some tools and techniques that can help you accomplish this.

5 Keyword Tools and Techniques

• Word Tracker is an online tool that tells exactly how many people are searching for any given keyword each month.

• Nichebot.com offers a number of keyword tools including a keyword list cleaner.

• Yahoo and Google both offer keyword tools.

• Determine what sites use your selected keywords in their title by searching intitle:keyword. Then find what sites use your keyword within their body text by searching intext:keyword. (Of course, you’ll want to replace “keyword” in this example with your keyword. Don’t add any extra spaces, or the search won’t work.)

• Review your website referral logs for commonly used keywords. After building a decent list, incorporate some of the keywords into your website using the tips outlined below, and then monitor results. Keyword selection is an ongoing process and requires significant trial and error. There is always something you can change to yield a better ranking.

5 Tips for Better Keyword Placement

Choosing the right keywords is only the first step to keyword optimization. Strategic placement of keywords within a website is equally important.

• The title tag of a website is the best place to put top keywords. Make sure that the title for each page in the site does a good job of targeting the keywords you chose in the above steps, while still effectively describing the actual content on each page.

• Incorporate the rest of your important keywords into the headline.

• Keywords in the body text should focus on 2-3 specific keywords per page.

• Meta tags are bits of data embedded in HTML code that provide information on any given web page. Meta tags should target prospective students, be individualized, and be placed on each page of the site. Doing this will increase the chance that a random web surfer will stumble upon your site while searching for information topically related to the content on any given page within the site.

• Place keywords toward the top of the page rather than further down.

Finally, don’t overdo it! If you use any given keyword too often in your text or your meta tags, Google may get suspicious. Your keywords should appear organic to the writing.

Links, Links, and More Links

Persuading other highly ranked, relevant, and related sites to link to your site is critical to making your page rank highly among search engines. There is no shortcut to achieving this type of linking structure. It simply takes a significant amount of effort. The good news is

you probably have a lot of entities willing to link to your site already. The following are the different type of links and linking strategies.

• Inbound Links – Start by contacting web-savvy groups or individuals affiliated with your school and ask if they want to place a link on their site that directs web surfers back to yours. This type of link is called an inbound link. For more inbound link ideas, check out other school’s websites and see who is linked to them. Achieving a linking structure that appears natural to search engines will help achieve greater results. Getting highly ranked, topically relevant pages to link to your site is ideal. But, if links are obtained from sites not boasting these characteristics, it is likely to only help and not hurt your rankings. In general, the more inbound links you can obtain the better.

• Reciprocal Linking – Some entities may only want to trade links. This is called reciprocal linking. Establishing a reciprocal link entails placing a link on your site directing visitors to another site in exchange for that site providing a link on their site back to yours. Search engines do not value reciprocal links very highly, but a few reciprocal links are not bad; they will help achieve a more natural looking link structure. This idea also holds true with lower ranking sites. While you don’t want to have a lot of low ranking site links, a few will usually provide a slight boost in your website’s rankings, and also help achieve a more natural appearing link structure.

• Anchor Text – Another factor that is pivotal to achieving a natural linking structure is establishing varied, keyword rich anchor text for each link obtained. Anchor text is the text displayed in the link on another page linking back to yours. If websites linking to your site are willing to accept suggestions for the anchor text, make sure each one is varied and include common keywords.

• Website Content - One of the best ways to generate inbound links is to incorporate valuable content into your webpage. Other websites will be more likely to link to your site if you provide content useful to them or their visitors. Hosting a blog or forum is a great way to do this. It should not be hard to find parents or faculty members to contribute valuable information to your blog. For information on how to optimize your blog for search engines look at ProBlogger.net. For more information on creating valuable blog content, visit buildabetterblog.com.

Similarly, hosting a forum is useful for site visitors, students, and faculty alike. It encourages personal communication and an exchange of ideas. Monitor your forums to stay in touch with your audience, and to understand what topics appeal to them. Craft new content accordingly.

Another great option is to post Podcasts or Video Feeds on your site. If faculty member or credible guest speaker hosts an interesting lecture, post it as a video or Podcast. Any of the above options present good alternatives for creating valuable content on your web page, a characteristic that attracts inbound links.

SEO is one of the easiest ways for a school to establish a sustainable competitive advantage online. The payoff from focusing funds toward SEO is greater than traditional marketing efforts. Effectively planning and implementation of the above components will certainly end in pleasing results.

For information on the importance of good SEO, as well as search friendly website design read, “Guide to Improved Search Engine Optimization for School Websites: Part 1.”
 

{ 0 comments }

For the ancient Greeks, theater was a public expression of deeply held-cultural beliefs, a religious experience based on a shared understanding of mythology, as interpreted by individual playwrights. By Shakespeare’s time, the theatrical experience had become secular and dependent on audience reaction. Theatergoers not only cheered or booed depending on their approval of characters onstage, but were known to throw insults, rotting vegetable, or worse at actors they did not care for.

Today, the audience is expected to sit quietly behind the fourth wall, laughing or applauding only at appropriate times, and woe be to those who attempt to inject their opinion of a play in progress. When Peter Pan was first produced onstage, J.M. Barrie worried whether or not audiences would be stirred from complacency into clapping for Tinkerbell. Even criticism is the jealously guarded right of a privileged class. But some companies are working to bring theater back to the people.

Last year, London’s Royal Opera house produced Twitterdammerung, a collaborative creation written entirely by “tweets”: micro-blog messages of 140 characters provided by 900 creative minds. Dubbed the People’s Opera, this publicity stunt yielded great press for Twitter, along with a work that was, in the words of one critic, “actually not that bad at all. I mean actually watchable, listenable and rather funny.” For a concoction created by committee, it’s an amazing testament to the power of collaboration.

High school and college students have long created their own original works, full of inside jokes and topical humor, to be produced by their peers, for their peers. Today, some schools in Tucson, Arizona are taking that aesthetic to younger children. Opening Minds through the Arts (OMA) is an educational program dedicated to using music to help students succeed in other academic areas. First graders, under the tutelage of graduate students in opera programs, have one-upped the Twitter opera by writing their own operas, words and music, and then performing them for classmates and parents.

In the same city, a nonprofit organization called Stories That Soar! has been providing schoolchildren the opportunity to stretch their creative muscles and participate in a collaborate theatrical experience since 2001. Troupe member visit participating schools, introducing a talking chest that wants to “eat stories.” Children are invited to submit their original writing to the chest, and these pieces are then reworked into a play that is acted out by adults. Children get to watch theater that is not only on their level, but created by their peers.

From classic audience-participation performances such as the Do-It-Yourself Messiah,  The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, to modern phenomena like The Buffy Sing Along, it’s clear that audiences want to get back into the act and become part of the show. Using one of these models, combined with the communication power of the Internet, your theater can also create a true community theater program.
 
 

{ 0 comments }

You’re no fool. You recognize the power of the Internet. You’ve customized your band’s page on MySpace and Facebook with your top singles and your favorite photos. You’ve even built your own homepage, or paid someone else to do it. Maybe you’ve gone the extra mile and joined a musical community like Linked-Musicians, ReverbNation, or HostBaby. That’s great. Now, what are you going to do with your new social networks?

1. There can be only one!

Your band is unique. Play your individuality up online. You’re real people with real messages for your fans. They want to know who you are. Add links talking about your history, including how you got together, your history and influences as a band, and personal biographies of every band member. Create new content available only on your site, like behind-the-scene photos and videos. All you need is a digital camera and someone to follow you around documenting your gig, rehearsal, or trip to the store to buy new guitar strings. Album artwork, upcoming performance schedules, lists of your favorite philosophers, and even snapshots of yourselves as small children all constitute high-interest content.

2. Talk to Me!

The Internet isn’t a one-way street. Once you start promoting yourself online, you need to provide an easy way for booking agents or promoters to reach you: your contact information. Don’t post your personal email address on the site unless you love unsolicited junk mail. Instead, designate an account just for band-related correspondence and post that information in a prominent place. If possible, make the “Contact Us” link a different color than the rest of the page. A corner of the page is a good place for this information. When you add this address, you can expect a certain amount of junk email to hit your inbox, but don’t worry! If spammers can find your site, so can real people. Services such as Gmail have excellent spam filters, and eventually your target audience will find you.

3. Feel the Love!

Toot your own horn. You’re musicians after all. Whenever your band makes the news or receives a positive review online, be sure you link to it so everyone sees how popular you are, and how people besides your mom think you’re great. Make sure to save these reviews to your hard drive, too. Sometimes sites fold or take down old content. You can always repost reviews (with permission and attributions) and other testimonials on your own pages. In addition, you can create an RSS feed so your fans can sign up to receive updates any time new content is posted on your website, blog, or news feed. When people are talking about you, that’s free publicity! Your website can turn up the volume on the buzz.

4. Right back at ya!

The Internet is all about community, and community means dialog. Give your fans that warm fuzzy feeling that comes from proximity to their idols by creating forums where fans can interact with each other and band members. Set up a message board where people can post questions or comments about the band or its performances, and make sure to answer those questions personally. If you can’t monitor these boards, find a host to interact with the community, set the overall mood of the forum, and ban trolls and other undesirables. You can even set up online chats during which fans can talk to the band online for an hour or so. This all helps to generate more positive press for you. You can cull the best of this information into testimonials reposted elsewhere on the site and use the contact with your fans to figure out what they want. If you can’t manage a forum or a board, keep a blog instead and write just for your fans. It’s an easy way to let folks comments and connect.

Stay tuned for part 2, in which we continue to reveal to you the awesome power of the Internet, the strength and beauty of your website, and the secret ninja skills of Web 2.0!

{ 0 comments }