It’s time for another SEO Advice post! Last week, I offered free SEO advice to PUA Lingo. I’m going to continue my SEO Advice series today by helping out another YoungEntrepreneur.com blog readers, Arik J. Flanders from I Slept Through Class.
Arik J. Flanders - http://www.isleptthroughclass.com/
Hi Evan,
In reference to your SEO Advice blog post, I wanted to submit my site (www.isleptthroughclass.com) to be considered in your featured article. The website is rooted around a college based niche that creates a platform for students to share classroom information in a socialized environment. The site has shown continual growth at more than 900 colleges and universities around the country. We have used a variety of techniques to help boost our SEO including, posting on blog/forums, being featured in many different online school newspapers, submitting all of our press releases and media publications to digg, delicious, stumbleupon, etc. We have also purchased key words through the major search engines and have split tested the ones with the highest conversions. We use many social bookmarking sites, post our viral videos on many of the major shared networks, utilize twitter, facebook, myspace and friendfeed. However, with all of these efforts combined the major search engines are still only our third highest traffic generator.
Therefore, we would really like to hear your opinions, thoughts and advice on how we can better use our resources to help boost our SEO traffic.
Thank you kindly for any and all of your time,
Arik J. Flanders
College Marketing Consultant
www.isleptthroughclass.com
My Recommendations
1) Get Some Content
Search engines send visitors to content so you need to make sure you have enough of it on your site. Aside from the blog and a few points in the Answer Board you don’t really have any content that Google can see because you have to have an account to log in. You should write articles on your important keywords like “college class notes” with at least 300-500 words. If you give the search engines the content they are looking for they will reward you with traffic!
2) Target Your Keywords
The title tag of your home page is I Slept Through Class:: college class notes. Take out the I Slept Through Class and put in more relevant keywords. You’re going to rank for I Slept Through Class because it’s your domain name. You want to start ranking for the other keywords that people who haven’t heard of you yet will be searching for. Once you’ve identified the top keywords, put them in your title tags as well as in the content across your site.
3) Be Careful About Link Buying
Watch out with the link buying strategy. It can help give you a short term Page Rank boost but if you do too much of it Google can penalize or even ban your site. The better strategy would be to create valuable content that people will want to link to instead of having to buy the links. Maybe you could release some of your notes for free or put a top 20 list together of the most slept through classes. Think of creative ways to build useful and valuable content and you’ll have all the links you need.
Good luck Arik!
Readers, what do you think about Arik’s website?
To learn more about how to get SEO tips for your website please read my post: Need SEO Advice? Submit Your Site!
Evan Carmichael
Matthew Toren is an Award Winning Author, Serial Entrepreneur, and Investor. He Co-Founded YoungEntrepreneur.com along with his brother Adam. Matthew is co-author of the newly released book:Small Business, Big Vision: “Lessons on How to Dominate Your Market from Self-Made Entrepreneurs Who Did it Right” and also co-author of Kidpreneurs.
The website is nice but i believe there is oportunity to make it classy in line with what new generation wants. Its very clean and well layed out but can incorporate the messy yet attractive look.
Also I agree that blog articles are must and it seems that section has been dedicated to microblogging. As suggested by you it makes sense to write articles highlighting not only important issue that relates to this segment but also the one’s which highlight more about the content in website.
My two cents.
I notice you are using the keywords meta. You need to ensure that all the keywords in the meta tag are actually on the page or you can get hit with a penalty for meta spamming.
Your meta description is pedestrian, you need to punch it up to get people to click on your URL in search results.
I imagine that a student searching for class notes would only be interested in his/her university or college, you should somehow figure out how to have spider accessible pages with your keywords modified by each institution i.e. Harvard Law: Screw Your Client-101 Notes, etc. It is much easier to rank for longer keywords and the bonus is that it is likely what the searcher will be searching on anyway. (you may have already done this on the site, I didn’t spend a lot of time poking around).
Cheers,
Jim
Thank you all very much for your insightful thoughts. We will look into all of your suggestions.
Best in business,
Arik Flanders