How to Optimize My Educational Site

[saadi81]

Hi!

I want to optimize my client educational website for SEO (especially G). I am putting my effort for several months. The top keyword to be focused is "Journal of [Topic]". At the moment, the site that is listed on top has only 66 pages indexed in google (please note that the domain of this site is much relevant to this search term); This top ranked website was previously hosted on Google Sites and now it is migrated to its own new domain but still it is on the top. I am surprized that the site with thousands of pages and higher inbound links are listed below this site. I am hoping for your expert advice to get my site listed on top for this specific keyword.

Thanks!

[edited by: tedster at 9:47 pm (utc) on Nov 12, 2011]
[edit reason] please avoid specific keywords, thanks [/edit]

[tedster]

Hello saadi81, and welcome to the forums.

There are hundreds of signals that Google uses to rank websites - many of which we don't understand clearly enough. One of the important shifts over recent years is the lowered importance of many on-page factors that used to almost guarantee top rankings, things like exact match titles and H1 tags.

Off-page factors have also evolved so that lots of exact-match anchor text can actually cause a ranking problem today whereas in the past it was almost a guarantee of top rankings.

Google (and other major engines as well) are working to measure how well you engage the audience in your niche, and they do that in a lot of ways. It is becoming more and more difficult to imitate those signals on your own. The best way to have those signals is actual audience engagement.

It's still a good thing (and natural) to have your keyword phrase in the title and H1 - but keep the keyword use in the rest of the content very natural. Rather than hammering away on the keyword phrase, be sure to use naturally related words, as well as some synonyms and so on.

And then generate some top-quality content that your visitors will appreciate and naturally want to share with other - through links, social mentions, bookmarking and any other methods they may come up with.

[canadafred]

Intelligent content usually appears important because of the care given to authoring it. The search engine likes important, unique and evolving stuff. So, writing well indicates the content of enough value for the author to compose it properly, intelligently.

Other things you can use to make your content appear important ... antonyms, morphology, abbreviations, acronyms, altered prefixes and suffixes, pluralize, optimisation optimize optimise ... lexicons (little lepricons I call them) I'm just fooling around now ... see ya

[saadi81]

Hi Guys!

Thanks for your support. It will be really helpful to me :)

[tedster]

antonyms, morphology, abbreviations, acronyms, altered prefixes and suffixes, pluralize, optimisation optimize optimise

Don't forget about co-occurring phrases: [reference [webmasterworld.com]]