|
.jpg "Flute Player") This
two part series is designed to give school bands an advantage by
incorporating better Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for their
websites. While private schools or universities may benefit the most
from these ideas, any school band that wants to grow and recruit more
top-notch players will benefit from this series. The implementation
of effective SEO will also help drive audience attendance at
concerts, and boost fundraising efforts. Part one of the series will
cover the importance of good SEO, includes some search friendly
website design tips, and a guide to keyword choice. Part two
includes some tips for better keyword placement, and some useful link
building strategies.
4
Reasons School Bands Should Invest in SEO
-
Parents
and youth trust the web as an immediate and relevant resource. Most
people look to the web when seeking out any form of information.
It's important that students looking for a school with a great
band are able to find your website, and realize the quality of your
program.
-
Parents
have more options for sending their children to school than ever
before, they expect more, and are harder to convince.
-
Any
school band is strapped for resources and must distribute limited
funds where they can make the most impact. Search engine
optimization is the most efficient and effective way to attract new
players for your band.
-
Effective
SEO can provide small school bands with a significant advantage over
larger schools with more funding for their band by capturing
prospective band members first.
Search
Engine Optimization is the practice of designing a website to include
popular keywords and strategic linking structure in order to rank
highly among search engines and drive traffic to a site. There is no
point in having a great web page if no one is able to find it. The
main components of SEO include, search friendly web site design,
keyword selection and placement, and link building.
Website
Design
The
design of your band's site is a critical factor for making it
search friendly. The challenge is striking a balance between
effective promotion of your band, and successful search engine
optimization.
SEO Friendly Web Site Design Tips
-
Create
Good Content
Having
great content within your website is critical to your SEO efforts.
The more valuable and informative you website is, the more traffic
and inbound links your band's website will attract. This will
make your site appear more useful your site appears to search
engines, and improve your rankings. Content creation is covered
extensively in part 2 of this series. For now, it's just
significant to realize its importance.
-
Limit
Rich Media Content - Rich content is attractive to visitors
but should be implemented with caution. If it does not help promote
your band, leave it out. It is often difficult for search engines
to crawl frames and java content. This makes it much more difficult
to achieve a high ranking among search engines. It is also useful
to note that those with low bandwidth internet connections will
become frustrated while waiting for pages to load. The tradeoff is
inevitably up to you. Search engine algorithms are becoming better
at identifying information embedded in flash and java content. It
is also true that much of this content can be optimized for search
with a little extra effort. For more information on optimizing rich
media content, visit www.seonews.com.
As a larger percentage of the population obtain high speed internet
connections, long load times will eventually become a non-issue. As
a general rule, with the pace technology is moving at, it would be
wise to begin to incorporate some of these elements rather than not.
-
Use
Sitemaps - Your school's website should be
designed around a site map. Each page on your site should have a
link back to the site map, as well as the homepage. If your
school's website does not have a sitemap, encourage them to
incorporate one. Site maps make it much easier for search engines
to find all pages on your site and index them regularly. The SEO
efforts you place toward the band page may never be realized if
search engines never index your page.
-
Facilitate
Viral Marketing - Your site should also be optimized for
viral marketing opportunities. It will not increase your website's
ranking, but it will help drive traffic and create buzz for your
band. Adding a bookmark or "add to favorites" feature
to the homepage is easy to do and will increase the change that a
past visitor will re-visit. Additionally, an "email this site
to a friend" link should be placed at the bottom and top of
each information rich page. The icon should boast the universal
"email this" icon, the back of an envelope.
Keywords
Keywords
tell what your site is about. With this in mind, search engines
search for the most relevant sites under any given keyword. So, you
must optimize your site to rank highly for the right keywords. This
is where your schools band might be able to gain an advantage over
other school's bands, through good keyword selection and
placement. The keywords you choose to optimize should be keywords
that students and parents use most often when searching for a school
with a great band.
3
Tips for Choosing the Right Keywords
-
Find
keywords that are used frequently by people searching for
information on school band programs, but are not included in
competing school's band sites, and optimize your site for some
of those keywords. Many band pages are optimized for very general
terms such as "(Schools Name) Band." While similar
terms may describe navigation within that certain site very well,
parents are more likely to type in a keyword such as "musical
opportunities for youth," and students may search for "awesome
high school band."
-
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 you can engage
in. Luckily there are some tools and techniques that can help you
accomplish this.
5
Keyword Tools and Techniques
-
Word
Tracker (www.wordtracker.com)
is an online tool that tells exactly how many people are searching
for any given keyword each month.
-
www.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."
-
Review
your website referral logs for commonly used keywords.
After
building a decent list, incorporate some of the keywords into your
band's 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 that will help yield a better ranking.
Lance
Trebesch and Colt Lapham
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
www.TicketPrinting.com
Thank
you for reading part one of "How to Optimize Your School Band's
Website to Recruit Top Players." For valuable information on
keyword placement and link building strategies, read part two.
Tags: band web site school band web site ticketprinting.com seo search engine optimization school band web site design
View blog reactions
|
