Africa Network: Case Study in Search Engine Optimization (Part 2)

synoppsys: We have applied some SEO recommendations to the Africa Network and will continue to monitor visitation and page rank in the coming months.

In this post, I would like to summarize steps we have taken to increase visitation to the Africa Network web site. In a previous post (Search Engine Optimization (SEO) 101), I reviewed 10 recommendations for optimizing one’s web site for search engines.

Recommendation: Create a Site Map

On October 30, 2007, we generated a free xml site map at (there are other sites for generating site maps). At this site, enter in your URL and then download the sitemap.xml. Place that file in the root directory of your web site.

Take a look at the file contents and notice how each page of your site is included. This site mapping will help Google traverse your site.

Next go to Google’s Webmaster Central, add your site through the Dashboard, and then upload your site map. It may take awhile for the next crawl of Googlebot. If you add pages to your site, make sure to update the site map.

There are valuable tools and information available at Google’s Webmaster Central. For example, you will be able to monitor Google’s crawls of your site.

Recommendation: Write Descriptive Page Titles

We added more descriptive titles to the pages: Africa Network Ohio State University

Recommendation: Allow Robots

For some unknown reason, we were disallowing crawls of the site. We modified the robots.txt file to allow robots.

Recommendation: Add Search Keywords to Content

We checked the site so that each reference to the “network” was changed to the “Africa Network.” The first reference to the network on the home page in the first paragraph was changed to “Africa Network at The Ohio State University” and was moved to the beginning of the first sentence. We also added “Africa Network Ohio State University” to ALT tags for images.

Recommendation: Increase Inbound Links

We requested that Africa Network appear in the A-Z listing of Ohio State’s web sites (http://www.osu.edu/alphaosu/alphaosu-incr.php).

What has been the impact of these changes to the Africa Network web site?

From November 1 to November 30, the number of unique visitors increased to 136. There were 43 unique visitors during the previous month. When you search for “Africa Network” at Google, it still appears on the 3rd page of search results. However, it has moved up several spots to the first return on the third page, so we may see it move to the 2nd page soon.

We will continue to check our progress. SEO takes patience.