Success!
As the first run of our SEO class approaches on September 6th, I thought I’d share the inspiration behind the class.
The Chi Movement Arts Center, home of Kun-Yang Lin/Dancers, has been the gracious host of our past few classes. The dance company was recently invited to perform at an international arts festival and had launched an intensive fund-raising effort, but they had a major problem. Their website was virtually “unfindable” via Google when searching for “kun-yang lin,” “kun-yang lin dancers,” or any similar variation.
Kun-Yang Lin/Dancers have a couple things going against them in terms of having a “type in the domain and go” web address. First, they use the .org extension and peoples’ first instinct tends to be .com. Secondly, their name has a hyphen, but the domain name itself does not.
Because of these challenges, it was especially important that people be able to find them via Google. So, the following is a list of actions we took to get them “findable:”
Find out who is coming up at the top
The first thing we did was assess the situation - basically, we wanted to know who was coming up ahead of them. The good news we saw here was they were basically their biggest competition. Every listing was in fact a reference to them, just not to their site. There were mentions on Temple.edu, PhiladelphiaDance.org, BroadStreetReview.com, etc. There were also hits for their own YouTube and Twitter pages.
Seeing this, I recommended they work on making sure all these other places (past and future) link back to their website. For example, their YouTube page mentioned their website, but it wasn’t actually a hyperlink. This is important because search engine rankings depend on backlinks - the more links you have going to your site the better.
Stop using www
Another thing I noticed in our assessment is that sometimes their site was linked to with the www and sometimes without. This ambiguity can have a negative SEO impact because search engines interpret the two URLs as separate; in short, you’re spreading your Google power across two sites instead of one. I suggested they stick with just linking to their site without the www and I set up some lines in their .htaccess file which would strip out the www even if someone entered it:
# STRIP OUT WWW
rewritecond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.(.*) [NC]
rewriterule ^/?(.*) http://%1/$1 [L,R=permanent]
Important HTML tags related to SEO
Next step was the foundation of any SEO audit - we made sure the <title>, <h1> and <meta> tags were all used on every page, and used in an appropriate way. I’ll be covering this material in more detail in Tuesday’s class.
Error pages
This wasn’t directly related to SEO, but having proper error pages set up is important. If a user tries to go to a page on your site that doesn’t exist, it’s a missed opportunity if you don’t have a proper error page sending them in the direction of a working page.
As you can see, the above changes did the trick for starting to get their site on track with search engine results. But there are other things that Kun-Yang Lin/Dancers can do so they start to grab up other search engine keywords they’re interested in (“CHI Arts,” “CHI Movement Arts Center,” “Dance Philadelphia” etc.) What we did was just the start, and really, there’s lots more to do. Here are some suggestions I gave them for improving the site even further:
- Kill the image maps! A substantial portion of their content is an image which won’t be read by search engines
- Make URLs more search engine friendly. Example: http://kunyanglin.org/Company-p4.htm could be http://kunyanglin.org/dancers/
- Make sure all images have alt and title tags
- Build a sitemap and submit it to Google
- Kill use of any frames
- Install Google analytics to get a better understanding of their traffic.
- Purchase the .com and .net domains and make sure they’re all pointing to the same place.
I gave them quite a laundry list. :-) None of this is a silver-bullet for SEO success, which is kind of the point of our SEO class. There are foundational and organizational things you need to take care of, which we’ll cover, but the thing we emphasize the most? Content, content, content.
