10 SEO Tips for Schools
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is an important consideration to take when working on websites. It is the way we optimise how websites are set up and the content that populates them to rank them better on search engines.
If someone searches for your school on Google (or another search engine), you want your school to be the top result! SEO is important for your school website; we want you to have a strong presence online in our digitally-led world.
Well into 2018, we have seen the algorithms and techniques for SEO change. To keep on top of things, here are 10 SEO tips for schools:
Website SEO tips
[1] Optimised homepage: ensuring that your homepage meets SEO best practice is a vital step in boosting your site's ranking. The main aim is to ensure that keywords and page title is correct.
Keywords should only be used once per page, otherwise you will be competing against other pages for ranking. For the homepage, you will want to look at keywords like:
school name (i.e. Interactive & School)
type of school (i.e. Independent & Preparatory / Senior / Secondary / Primary etc.)
Page title should be the name of your school.
[2] URLs
In a similar vein, using good practice across your URLs will help with SEO. The page's title should match (or at least make up the core of the URL) as it moves through the different levels of your sitemap.
If you decide to change a page URL, you should ensure that redirects are set up first. It would be an mark against you if an indexed page encounters a 'page not found error'. Changes to your site may not be reflected on a search engine straight away - it will take time for it to index updates.
[3] Images
There are two important things to consider when adding images to a site:
are images properly sized? Anything that is either too large or too small will have a negative impact to your SEO. Make sure that you resize images and compress them as much as possible to boost site load speeds and SEO.
are images tagged? adding correct tags and alt-tags to images will help a search engine recognise the content that is on there. Search engines can only read data, so having a titled image will help with this
[4] Page titles & descriptions
Take a look at the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) below for a school search. You will notice two SEO factors pulling through onto the results:
Page titles
Meta description
Populating these fields will give a massive boost to your ranking.
[5] Headings & Sub Headings
How page content is laid out is another important factor for SEO. You should follow a headings and sub headings layout:
Heading1: is the page's main heading title and should only be used once on a page
Heading2-6: are for sub headings. These can be easily turned into anchor points, making it easier to share specific parts of a page too!
Body: is normal body content that falls under Headings
[6] Internal links
Using internal links helps search engine robots find your pages easier, which means your site ranking gets boosted! It also encourages visitors to your site to explore more and stay longer (which you will soon read is another SEO tick).
It's easy to do, just hyperlink key phrases in your body content to other areas of your site, as can be seen above.
[7] Footer
A great footer will contain sub-menu links and key links to help direct site visitors to other areas. It is often neglected and such an easy thing to get right. A good footer will work in a similar way to internal links and so be a great aid to SEO refinements.
External SEO tips
[8] Links to your website
Links from other high ranking websites is one of the key ways to get up the google ranking. In our anatomy of the perfect SERP article, we look at blogs, social media and high-ranked sites that link to your site have a positive impact on SEO.
[9] Keywords
Knowing the keywords that people use when searching for your site on a search engine can be a massive help in determining which ones you should add to your site.
There are lots of tools you can trial for this, but Google Analytics is a highly recommended place to start.
Expect keywords to become longer and influenced by the continuing trend of Voice OS' (i.e. Siri, Alexa, Cortana and Google Assistant), where search terms will change based on how people speak over how people search by typing.
[10] Sitemaps
Your site's sitemap (or sitemap.xml) is what search engine robots will look through to "understand" the layout of your site. If everything matches up (i.e. titles, headings and the like) it boosts your site ranking.
If you have made changes to your site (e.g. changing the URL on a page) you can ask Google or Bing to relook at your sitemap. Just make sure that it is up to date and reflecting the new information, then request.
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Mastering SEO is a process - and we are here to help! Request our Social/SEO & Parent Comms Proposal. (< yes - that is good SEO 😂)
We hope that this article helps gives you some great starting points for optimising your school website and ranking higher in search terms.
As always, please do leave comments below about anything explored in this #SchoolBytes article.