cjyabraham.com

Since my last post on this, I have made a few tweaks to GothamSchools.org to try and further improve its rankings on Google:

• I changed the wording on the About page to use “NYC schools” instead of “the nation’s largest school district”
• I similarly changed the wording of the welcome message on the home page
• I added Description and Keywords meta tags to the home page and am generating them on all single-post pages with the help of the All in One SEO Pack plugin

Today, this is how GothamSchools is ranking on Google:

• nyc schools (26th, up from 37th)
• schools in nyc (18th, up from 32nd)
• nyc public schools (17th, up from 33rd)
• new york schools (> 50)
• school nyc (> 50)
• nyc education (> 50)
• new york city schools (> 50)

(more…)

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:

• 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)

(more…)

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.) (more…)