SEO on GothamSchools.org
In order to increase the traffic and impact of GothamSchools.org, I’ve been doing some research into Search Engine Optimization. I want to increase the search engine ranking for relevant keyword phrases. The first step was to identify the keyword phrases that we want to rank highly for. I used Google’s Keyword Tool to do this research. I came up with a short-list of keyword phrases:
- nyc schools (inital rank: > 50)
- schools in nyc (> 50)
- nyc public schools (> 50)
- new york schools (> 50)
- school nyc (> 50)
- nyc education (> 50)
- new york city schools (> 50)
By contrast, we can look at the rankings for insideschools.org, a similar site to GothamSchools. It ranks in 3rd for “schools in nyc” and 25th for “nyc schools”. All other keyword phrases have it ranked above 50. (I am tracking these rankings using this tool.)
As I understand it, Google’s rankings are determined mainly by two things: inbound links to our site and the content of our site. I don’t think we need to do too much about inbound links as these will grow organically over time. The link from huffingtonpost is an example of an inbound link. Since huffingtonpost itself is an important site, this type of inbound link would do a lot to help our rankings.
As for the content of our site, I think we can make a few tweaks to better advertise GothamSchools.org for what it is. We need to include the key words and phrases that identify us. For example, we should have “nyc schools” showing up more prominently in the copy of our site. If you look at Insideschools, you’ll see “NYC Public School” showing up in the <h1> tag of their site. This will do a lot for them in their rankings for that phrase.
I made a list of things we can do to increase our rankings on particular search phrases:
- Change our <h1> text to include some keywords. Currently it is just “GothamSchools” This text doesn’t actually show up anywhere but is seen by the search engines.
- Add a tagline that includes some keywords
- Change the <title> text from just “GothamSchools” to “GothamSchools – tagline”
- Could we decrease the number of outbound links on our sidebar a little bit? Apparently Google does not like pages that consists of a large number of links as it can seem like we’re doing link exchanges in an effort to inflate our search engine rankings.
I will make some of these changes and see how they affect our rankings.