SEO Developments at GothamSchools.org
The initial research into Search Engine Optimization of GothamSchools.org was discussed in this post. Since then, I have made some changes to the site:
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I changed the <title> tag on the home page of the site to read “GothamSchools - Breaking News and Analysis of the NYC Public Schools”
- I changed the text inside the <h1> to read “GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools”. I’m not sure if this text will have any effect on the rankings since the CSS makes it invisible.
These changes were made on December, 19, 2008. Within a day or so I noticed a change in our ranking for some of our keyword phrases. The new rankings fluctuated a bit over the last few weeks. Today, this is how GothamSchools is ranking:
- nyc schools (37)
- schools in nyc (32)
- nyc public schools (33)
- new york schools (> 50)
- school nyc (> 50)
- nyc education (> 50)
- new york city schools (> 50)
We have plans to introduce a tagline into our site design. We can make sure to choose a tagline that contains some of our keywords. Apart from that, though, I’m not sure what other things can be done to increase our search engine rankings by manipulating the content of our site. Does anyone have any other ideas?
January 11th, 2009 at 8:36 am
The one this that this plugin does: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/
that might help is adding meta tags to every post.
January 12th, 2009 at 6:19 am
@Anil: I had the impression that meta tags have no influence on google rankings. This thing seems to do other things as well so I’ll look into it. Thanks for the tip.
January 15th, 2009 at 12:36 pm
You have to be a little careful with text that isn’t displayed, as you can get punished for it. How or why or when is kept secret, though.
Self-linking using good keywords might be useful. That is, consider the links in your footers or elsewhere, even when they refer back to the site itself they could add keywords. Maybe augmentations to the category archives would help in that case? Also you might be able to put titles on the categories. E.g., for “newsroom” the title “news about New York Public Schools”. I think titles get some attention. With the current drop-down I see for categories, this might suppress the benefit of those links.
The meta description *is* useful in bookmarking occasions. When posting a link somewhere, especially somewhere that includes descriptions (like Facebook), the meta description is often used as a default. More generally, anything that will make readers’ bookmarks use your desired keywords will help your optimization. Having a single description for the site would thus be less desirable, as that suppresses the variety of keywords you might otherwise get from individual posts — and I think diversity will be better than consistency.
April 15th, 2010 at 11:23 am
One of the most important thing to make real dreaming about 1st position of google is diversity of link sources, and links of course should to be dofollow.