Getting your website ranked to the top of the search results is very important for your dojo.

Ranking in the top of the search results can be very hard to achieve, but with a little bit of work, you can start to crawl your way up the results list. The process is called search engine optimization (SEO).

Why SEO is Important for your school?

These days, most students and their parents, will find you via online searches. Making sure you ranking well for the search terms relevant to your School and Martial arts style, is a key element in helping these people find and contact you, about joining your school.

Good SEO will influence your rankings in search engines, via some key criteria. A brief summary of a few of these items follows.
These things are elements of your website that you can work on RIGHT NOW, to begin improving how easily you are found online.

Ideally, all the items mentioned below are things  you should be able to manage yourself, via simple to use SEO tools within your current website. If you are unable to currently do this, you should be talking with your website person asap.

 

Title Tags

Title tags are the phrases that are at the top of the browser window. In addition, the title tag also becomes the link shown to people in a search results page.
This is one the of most important items on your page because it is what search engines look  at determine if the content on your page matches a particular search query. If the keywords in the title match the search query that was entered, then the search engines think that page must be relevant.

It is  important to make titles appropriate and relevant, and they should describe accurately what will be found on your page. Keep your title tag to 50 characters in length to keep visible in the search results to avoid being automatically truncated. They have limits on what they’ll display so be sure to keep this in mind.

 

Keywords

Keywords are terms that you use to attract a targeted audience. They help influence where you rank in search results pages.
Your goal should be to get high rankings on terms that are being searched by highly qualified potential students.

Ranking for terms that are  general (eg: “martial arts”, “karate”, “mma”, etc) won’t necessarily bring in more students, as you will find that all your competitors in your area will be using the same terms.

It would be far better to rank for the keyword phrase “Coorparoo Martial Arts”, or “Surry Hills Karate”, as people who are typing these words or search phrases into Google (or Bing) are likely to live in that city and are looking for martial arts lessons for themselves or their children. Talk about a qualified search!

PERFORM THIS QUICK TEST:
Open up Google.com.au and type in “Martial arts <insert your suburb+ city>” and see where you are in the search results list. If you’re not on the first page, and are not #1, 2 0r 3, you need to get to work on altering your keywords!

 

Headlines

These are different from titles, as they appear on the page where a user can read them.
A headline helps page content stand out. Each page should have it’s own unique keyword rich headline and entice people to read further and pique their interest.

 

Body Copy

What you write your website pages is important. Search engines trawl through the text on pages, to try to understand what the information is about. Therefore, writing good quality content is one of the best investments in your website SEO that you can make. The information on each page should be clear and use the keywords you’ve selected for each page.

Your should make sure that Key information students are looking for on your site (eg: Class locations, timetables, events calendars, etc) can be also found and read by search engines. Making this available only via downloading a PDF, means you are making things harder for your students and for search engines.

You should be adding new content to your site every month to train the search engines to come back often and look at your site again. The more content you produce more frequently, the faster the search engines come back to your site.
A good way of doing this is to have a blog on your site, which you add a post to, at least once per month.

 

Internal Linking

It is a good idea to look for ways to add links from your content to other pages on your own site.

Not only does this prompt your website users to visit other information on the site (which then keeps them interested & learning about your martial arts school), it also helps the Search engines to understand the structure of your site. It helps give a little “link juice” to those pages, because Search engines look at how many times a page is linked from within a site.  This then tells the Search engine what importance it has.

Be sure not to go “link crazy” though, as overdoing it can cause the search engines think you are trying to trick them,causing them to penalise your ranking score.  Also, it will make the page and hard to read for humans.

For example, you can add a link in your blogs, when you use the name of your school or your style,  to a page that talks specifically about your particular Martial Arts Style.

 

Site Map

Your site must have a site map, as it is vital for the Search engines. As well, you should have a human-readable version of the site map available and link to it from every page on your site. This will not only give you more chances to get ranked better in the search engines, it provides a way for experience internet users, to find content on your site.

 

This information should hopefully begin to give you a better idea of what search engine optimization is and how it can help you get higher rankings for your Martial Arts School.