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We want to and will make it easy for schools to keep their staff, pupils, parents, partners, other stake-holders and wider community informed, updated and engaged.
Now, by merely typing in the text you can do it too!
It's so easy even 7 year old children can do it. If you are able to move a mouse, click a few buttons and string a few sentences together you can maintain a cutting edge site.
We'll give you all the training you'll need, support you on the phone or with email, all to make sure you get the best out of your investment.
Our killer features are:
Superb content management and blog software. Excellent Google optimisation.
An email to weblog interface, making updating your school blog a doddle.
Top draw support and feedback.
Try a demo or build your
Now, by merely typing in the text you can do it too!
It's so easy even 7 year old children can do it. If you are able to move a mouse, click a few buttons and string a few sentences together you can maintain a cutting edge site.
We'll give you all the training you'll need, support you on the phone or with email, all to make sure you get the best out of your investment.
Our killer features are:
Superb content management and blog software. Excellent Google optimisation.
An email to weblog interface, making updating your school blog a doddle.
Top draw support and feedback.
Try a demo or build your
30 day free trial
school website yourself. What will you write today's school news to be?Archive page for Wednesday, 26 September 2007
We, Sep 26, 2007Being top in Google
If you're not in Google you may as well not be on the Internet. In the US Google accounts for 65-70% of traffic referrals. Here, in the UK it's higher—we tend to stick to just Google.
All our school sites are top in SERPs for common queries. And here lies the trick.
All our sites are indexed fully and rapidly. Usually within hours of an update. This is because we ping Google's blog search. We ping all the major services: Technorati, Weblogs.com, Feedburner, Yahoo, Feedster; immediately your post is published.
But pinging doesn't get you to top result in Google's SERP. It's a mixture of keywords, page rank, back links and internal links, anchor text, domain, age and topicality. That mixture is called Google's algorithm. It's their secret sauce.
Keywords. Obviously, they need to be in the document, in the body text and in the page's title. All our sites make sure that keywords are in the right places. Even our deeper, archived news items have the key words in their URLs. Each page is SEO'd correctly, perfectly, semantically. That is, we are optimised for Google.
Page rank. It's a number assigned to a website saying how good it is. Sites are PR1-PR10. Some are PR0 (zero) and aren't ranked at all. The vast, vast majority of sites are PR unranked.
All our sites are PR2-PR3!!!
Which means, to Google, that they good, proper and handy. Good, that they aren't spam sites—they're trusted. Proper, that they link to good places on the net. Handy, that they have the right sort of information inside them
Back links. These are links from other sites to yours. If you have lots, this is good. Google thinks, if you're well linked to, you must be a useful site. But, if those back links are from bad sites, spam sites, rough neighbourhoods, this may adversely affect you. (Some sites spam other site's comments, referers, trackbacks, just to get more link juice.)
If the sites that link to you are good, that they have a high page rank themselves, then you get extra credit.
All our sites are interlinked from this site and from most of our school sites. Each high PR site passes good link love to other schools. Thus, new schools on our network rise to number one in SERPs, within a day or two.
Internal links. Our internal linking structure has developed over the past years, since our first use in 1999. We have site maps, or or as we like to call them site structures on every page. Each links back to the home page, each page also has a nice shiney Home button and some other links back to the front page. All telling Google what link is important.
Likewise our department pages are always on each page, each department lists news items, which each have their own page. As visitors can easily find their way around, so can Google's crawler.
Anchor text. Not only does Google examine back links, it examines the text that's used in that link.
<a href = "http://toftstead.educatr.com/">Toftstead Primary</a>
In this case, this new school, Toftstead Primary, is the anchor text. So, if you search for "Toftstead Primary" the above link will help you move higher up the SERPs, where as this anchor text:
<a href = "http://toftstead.educatr.com/">a school</a>
Will not help much at all. Though Google will know it's a school. It's not much, but it will help a little.
Age of site. Older sites are usually good sites. New sites can sometimes be spammy. This is what Google thinks. But here, we help boost new sites to the top, because we're here to help.
I recently had a commercial site sent to Google's sandbox. A mythical place where your site isn't to be found at all in the SERPs. Why? It was a new site on a domain that had been used before. And, it rose too fast in Google PR, Google became suspicious, looked at the back links, at the subject areas of those back links and figured that education had nothing to do with phones. There were a few other reasons, but essentially, Google thought a brand new site was gaming the system.
Topicality of back links. All our sites are school sites which back and interlink with each other, adding weight to each other.
All this adds up to your site being in the top SERPs page. It's no good if you're below the 10th position, people have to go looking for you, and they don't. They assume you haven't got a website.
But also, it means that you can link to other sites and pass on you authority in some good link love. Be careful though, don't go linking to web farms, don't go promoting your site to unsavory places either! There's no need to promote your site at all, we've done it for you, from the get-go.
All our school sites are top in SERPs for common queries. And here lies the trick.
All our sites are indexed fully and rapidly. Usually within hours of an update. This is because we ping Google's blog search. We ping all the major services: Technorati, Weblogs.com, Feedburner, Yahoo, Feedster; immediately your post is published.
But pinging doesn't get you to top result in Google's SERP. It's a mixture of keywords, page rank, back links and internal links, anchor text, domain, age and topicality. That mixture is called Google's algorithm. It's their secret sauce.
Keywords. Obviously, they need to be in the document, in the body text and in the page's title. All our sites make sure that keywords are in the right places. Even our deeper, archived news items have the key words in their URLs. Each page is SEO'd correctly, perfectly, semantically. That is, we are optimised for Google.
Page rank. It's a number assigned to a website saying how good it is. Sites are PR1-PR10. Some are PR0 (zero) and aren't ranked at all. The vast, vast majority of sites are PR unranked.
All our sites are PR2-PR3!!!
Which means, to Google, that they good, proper and handy. Good, that they aren't spam sites—they're trusted. Proper, that they link to good places on the net. Handy, that they have the right sort of information inside them
Back links. These are links from other sites to yours. If you have lots, this is good. Google thinks, if you're well linked to, you must be a useful site. But, if those back links are from bad sites, spam sites, rough neighbourhoods, this may adversely affect you. (Some sites spam other site's comments, referers, trackbacks, just to get more link juice.)
If the sites that link to you are good, that they have a high page rank themselves, then you get extra credit.
All our sites are interlinked from this site and from most of our school sites. Each high PR site passes good link love to other schools. Thus, new schools on our network rise to number one in SERPs, within a day or two.
Internal links. Our internal linking structure has developed over the past years, since our first use in 1999. We have site maps, or or as we like to call them site structures on every page. Each links back to the home page, each page also has a nice shiney Home button and some other links back to the front page. All telling Google what link is important.
Likewise our department pages are always on each page, each department lists news items, which each have their own page. As visitors can easily find their way around, so can Google's crawler.
Anchor text. Not only does Google examine back links, it examines the text that's used in that link.
<a href = "http://toftstead.educatr.com/">Toftstead Primary</a>
In this case, this new school, Toftstead Primary, is the anchor text. So, if you search for "Toftstead Primary" the above link will help you move higher up the SERPs, where as this anchor text:
<a href = "http://toftstead.educatr.com/">a school</a>
Will not help much at all. Though Google will know it's a school. It's not much, but it will help a little.
Age of site. Older sites are usually good sites. New sites can sometimes be spammy. This is what Google thinks. But here, we help boost new sites to the top, because we're here to help.
I recently had a commercial site sent to Google's sandbox. A mythical place where your site isn't to be found at all in the SERPs. Why? It was a new site on a domain that had been used before. And, it rose too fast in Google PR, Google became suspicious, looked at the back links, at the subject areas of those back links and figured that education had nothing to do with phones. There were a few other reasons, but essentially, Google thought a brand new site was gaming the system.
Topicality of back links. All our sites are school sites which back and interlink with each other, adding weight to each other.
All this adds up to your site being in the top SERPs page. It's no good if you're below the 10th position, people have to go looking for you, and they don't. They assume you haven't got a website.
But also, it means that you can link to other sites and pass on you authority in some good link love. Be careful though, don't go linking to web farms, don't go promoting your site to unsavory places either! There's no need to promote your site at all, we've done it for you, from the get-go.
