SEO is critically important to any business, but especially so to educational publishers. When teachers and educators search for quality content that impacts their students’ academic success, they need to find programs and solutions as quickly as possible with as much supporting efficacy evidence as is available.

When SEO is used correctly, you can help ensure that web searchers looking for keywords that are core to their needs and interests will find your web pages at the top of the search engine results.  Appearing at the top of the lists of results assures the searcher that those links will take them to content that is relevant to their informational needs.

By customizing your web content to include answers to the common questions that arise in your product category and tagging with particular keywords, you can instantly engage these potential buyers and become their trusted source of information.

SEO is effective because the first two-thirds of the new sales model is conversation with your community.  Product recommendations shared between educators have always driven buying decisions in the K-12 market. SEO strategies provide publishers the opportunity to help facilitate that conversation.

As your SEO strategies put your content at the top of search engine results, in effect, you are answering the searcher’s question, “How do I solve my problem?” When site visitors discover your content and evaluate how it meets their needs, they have the information they require to make a confident, informed buying decision.

By maximizing the effectiveness of your SEO efforts, you help educators find the solutions to their students’ needs quickly, easily and effectively. Use SEO well and open the door to increased sales of your products and better academic achievement for the students who use them.

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SEO can take many forms but one time-tested strategy is evaluating the primary keywords that people enter into search engines to find relevant content. Make sure that those keywords appear multiple times in your page text. Strive to use those key words as frequently as you can while ensuring that your text still reads easily and naturally to your audience. You want to avoid “stuffing” keywords into your text artificially, however. Current recommendations are that keywords should comprise no more than four percent of your total text.

When automated programs from the search engines called “spiders” find your website, they create an index of words used on your web pages. The more frequently keywords appear on your pages, the more relevant  the search engine considers your page for those keywords and the higher it places the link to your website on the list. This is called “organic” search and is more valuable to a searcher than “paid” search links.

Other strategies can be used for SEO as well. For example, using keywords in the titles of links to other pages on your site is attractive to search engines. Link anchor text is considered highly relevant as it indicates the presence of additional, pertinent linked resources.

Additionally, as other websites find yours, such as educator social networks or curriculum associations, you receive incoming links from other websites. This indicates to search engines that your content is more authoritative. And, if those incoming links share some of your valuable keywords, than so much the better.

These strategies and more can help your content move closer to the top search engine results for the keywords that matter most to you and your educational business.

 Next time: SEO Helps You Deliver Effective Learning Solutions

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As the Internet becomes an increasingly mainstream part of everyone’s life, connecting with educators, schools and districts online has never been more important to educationl publishers than it is right now. Fortunately, the highly interactive nature of today’s websites makes it easier than ever to facilitate conversations that highlight the need for your products and also draw visitors deep into your website to investigate your offerings.

But building a strong website isn’t enough. K-12 educators and industry decision makers need to be able to easily find your products and services online. Neglecting search-engine optimatization strategies (SEO) for your website, means limiting visits to your website and leaving educators unaware of the help that you offer.

While the concept of “if you build it, they will come” may have worked for websites a decade ago, the Internet has grown so dramatically that your site could be lost in a sea of millions of related sites on the web. Carefully leveraged SEO strategies can make all the difference between a website that successfully attracts a steady stream of visitors and a site that fails to connect with educators.

To draw people to your website, you need to make sure your website appears as close to the top of search engine results as possible. When educators, school personnel and potential customers search on the web for terms and phrases relevant to your products, your website needs to show up on the the list of link returns. Searchers see your website link and click through to get more information on your products.

Since web searches show results in order of relevance to the search terms, the people  searching are predisposed to value the results closer to the top of the list more than links listed farther down or on the second, third or fourth pages of link returns.

The method used to push your content to the top as far as possible is called search enginge optimation or SEO.

 Next time: WHAT IS SEO EXACTLY?

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