A Simple Way to Help Your Martial Arts School’s Website Rank Higher in Google, MSN and Yahoo!
More and more people start looking for a martial arts academy by doing a web search. They jump on Google, enter the type of program they’re looking for (along with their city) and press “search”.
A list of search results pops up, they start clicking on web pages and start making calls and sending emails.
That’s why a properly optimized web page can result in lots more leads, enrollments
and money for your martial arts academy.
Search engine optimization is a BIG field of study. But most experts agree there is one simple thing you can do to improve your website’s page ranking in Google, MSN, Yahoo! or any other search engine for that matter.
It all has to do with your “page title”.
What is a “page title”?
The answer is simple: Web page title is that big of text at the very top of your browser window.
I’m not talking about the address bar where you enter a website you want to visit. I’m talking about the text above that – up in the top border of the page.
Anyway, a recent study was conducted by SEOmoz.org, a search engine optimization firm. In this study, they gathered the top “search engine gurus” and asked them a simple question: “What are the biggest factors in getting a higher page rank in the major search engines?”
All the gurus gave their opinion and SEOmoz got a list of all these factors together, grouped them into categories (there are tons of factors) and ranked them in order of importance.
And guess what #1 was? Right: page title.
Here’s why: the title of a web page is what you see in a list of Google search results.
It’s the blue text you click on. Try it. Go to google and put in the search term “through the ranks” (our site) and see what comes up. Go ahead and do it now. You’ll get the following result:
Did you do it? You did? Good. Did you notice how the link “Through the Ranks – Martial Arts School Newsletter Made Easy!” was highlighted in blue on the results page? That is the page title. Here it is again on the page itself:
What Should Your Page Title Contain?
Your page title should hold keywords and valuable information about your page. It should be descriptive and relevant to what people are searching for.
Get a list of keywords together such as: taekwondo, karate, kids’ martial arts, and any other types of programs you teach. Then – and this is critically important because you market locally – put your city (or town) and some of the large surrounding cities in that page title. This is a big secret: Local searching is becoming more targeted and more important in search results pages every day.
If I owned a martial arts academy myself, a great combination of keywords for my area would be:
- Martial Arts
- Karate
- Taekwondo
- Jiu-Jitsu
- Wichita
- Andover
- El Dorado
- Augusta
- Rose Hill
- KS
Get it? Put in all those search terms people would use to find YOU. If you track where your leads come from – and you have any internet leads – ask those people if they can remember what they searched for. Believe it or not, some will actually remember what they punched into Google.
Now, jump onto the internet, pull up your website and take a look at the title.
Does it say something lame like “Welcome” or “Home”?
Or does it contain descriptive keywords people could use to find you…and Google could use to index your site? If not, call your web designer NOW and get him or her to change it immediately.
If they won’t update your page title right away, you’re losing money. Call us and we’ll do it for you the same day. It’s that important.
Improving your page title is one of the quickest and easiest things you can do to improve your website’s ranking in Google, Yahoo and any other search engine for that matter. By the way, if you want more information on search engine optimization, the search ranking factors study I mentioned earlier is an excellent resource.