How to Use Search Engine Strategies to Pull a Flood of New Students Through Your Web Site
In my past couple of columns, I explained the importance of your martial arts school having an Internet presence. I also prioritized the different stages of Web site development, according to which would bring more business to your school. I briefly covered the importance of having both prospects and students’ sections, so you can target new business and retain more of your current students.
After you decide you need a Web site, the next most important question is, “How will my prospects audience find it?” You can promote the section for current student at your school, with letters, flyers, posters and classroom announcements. Now, you might think that you should launch your Web site before being concerned how prospects will find it – and you would be right and wrong. Obviously, you must select and prepare the content of your Web site before it can exist; however, as you strategically develop the contents (especially the prospects’ section), you can make some smart choices that will make it more “search-engine-friendly” when it does go live – and will help to maximize the number of people who find it, and more easily.
What is a search engine? According to Wikipedia (the Web-based encyclopedia), “Web search engines (such as Google) provide an interface to search for information on the World Wide Web. Information may consist of Web pages, images and other types of files.” To provide organized, relevant information about the myriad of subjects on the Internet, search engines search, organize and prioritize Web sites into their relevant subjects. Search engines do this by sending their agents (called spiders) to “read” through the content of hundreds of thousands of Web sites to find “hints” as to where to categorize them. One of your first search-engine strategies is to provide those “hints” for your Web site in a variety of ways, so your Web site is placed in the correct category and ranked appropriately.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the cyber-speak process that is used to make your Web site search-engine-friendly. In fact, when you create a Web site you have two main audiences: your prospective students and the search engines. Your prospects visit your Web site to learn the many benefits of martial arts (and your school) for their children – confidence, discipline, concentration and academic improvements – or themselves – fitness, weight loss and stress reduction.
Your Web site’s second audience (search engines) is the agents, or spiders, that search for valuable content, according to users’ search terms. When an Internet user wants to find a martial arts school in a specific city and state, Omaha, Nebraska, for example, he or she types the search terms, “martial arts Omaha Nebraska,” in any of the popular search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc.) and they will list all schools in the Omaha area with Web sites, in order of importance.
How search engines develop this hierarchy of most relevant to least relevant Web sites is sometimes a point of contention among Web marketers and is in a constant state of change; however, there are certain rules-of-thumb you can follow, so your Web site will be search-engine-ready.
The first step is to choose a key phrase that best describes your school. Ideally, this key phrase will also be the name of your Web site (the domain name) and the title of your main page and included in the main heading of your page as well as used in the text throughout the site.
In future columns, I will explain more about keywords and key phrases. At this stage in the development of your Web site, all you need to know is that you must choose a phrase that prospects and those “spiders” will clearly understand and is used often in the text.
Your key phrase should be rather straightforward. Let’s say you have a Karate school in Albany, New York – you would want to choose “karate Albany” as your key phrase. Just the word, “karate,” would be too general. A search engine would “read” that keyword and list all Web sites with content related to “karate” – in Albany and everywhere. The keyword, “Albany,” would also be non-specific, resulting in a list of Web sites and content about Albany. Your martial arts school’s Web site would probably be on that list, but so would all other Albany businesses with Web sites and any general references to Albany. Your prospects would have to spend too much time looking for your Web site on that extraordinarily long list, reducing those that would find it to very few – and that’s not smart marketing.
What you should remember from this column is that you should choose a keyword phrase that best describes your school and then use it often and strategically throughout your Web site.
