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.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) 101

synoppsys: You can improve visitation to your site by applying simple and free SEO techniques.

SEO involves using tools and techniques to increase the likelihood that the pages of your site will be “crawled” by search engine “robots” (specialized software) and given a higher “page rank” than your competitors. We’ll focus on Google here, since roughly 50% of searches are performed at Google (or other sites who use the same algorithms).

Why is it important to optimize your site for Google? Because a lot of traffic through your site will come from keyword searches through Google.

SEO takes experimentation (Google’s algorithms are top secret) and patience (you might not see results for months). It is a complicated subject (you can buy 300 page books on the subject)–it is a little bit of science and a little bit of an art form.

First, let’s dispel a common assumption. Google pretty much ignores meta data tags on your pages. Those are tags at the top of your html pages that look like this: <meta name=”keywords” content=”OSU, Ohio State, Ohio State University, The Ohio State University, Big 10, Buckeyes, College, University, Scarlet and Gray, Ohio”>

Even though we really aren’t sure how Google’s algorithms work, we know a lot of the factors that they consider important. Here are 10 easy and free (“organic”) SEO tips. We’ll describe these in future posts in the context of our Africa Network case study.

Africa Network: Case Study in Search Engine Optimization (Part 1)

synoppsys: I describe a web site we will use as a case study to later demonstrate SEO techniques.

My office hosts a web site for the Africa Network–an important initiative of the Executive Dean’s Office. It was recently discovered that googling “africa network” does not produce a match on the first page of search results. (A different organization, africanetwork.org, is #1). Africa Network at Ohio State appears on the 3rd page. People rarely page past the first page of Google search results. In fact, they tend to immediately click on that #1 search result. That’s why for most web sites, especially e-commerce sites, a Google #1 rank is the ultimate goal to maximize the number of visitors (and potential customers). If I refine my search to “africa network ohio state” (no quotes) at Google, I get a #1 search result. The problem is that I would have to know that our Africa Network is at Ohio State.

Now let’s take a look at the traffic on the Africa Network site when we discovered that we had a search engine problem: from Oct 1, 2007 to Oct 31, 2007, there had been 43 unique visitors to the site. (These data are from Google Analytics, a topic for another post.)

Clearly we have some work to do to inform people about the Africa Network via the web. Our goal: a #1 rank on Google search for the keywords “africa network,” resulting in more visitors to our site.

In the next post, I will provide an overview of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and ultimately describe steps we have taken to improve our search ranking for Africa Network.