Are You Guilty of these Search Engine Optimization Mistakes?

While you’re way ahead of most martial arts schools if you have a website, you still need to apply fundamental search engine optimization elements to help get higher rankings.

Having a higher rankings for your targeted keywords will help you to drive more qualified people to your website from within your geographic area.

However, in order to do this, you have to build your website in such a way to make it “search engine friendly.”

That process is called search engine optimization.

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization, or SEO as it is often called, is the process of structuring your website to be able to be easily found and ranked in the search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo for targeted keywords or keyword phrases.

NOTE: Keyword is something like “Karate” a keyword phrase is something like “San Diego California Karate.”

Following are five common SEO mistakes I see on martial arts schools websites. Many more posts on this subject are to come.

1. Not including keywords people are searching for on your site

Your potential customers sit down, turn their computer on, fire up their browser and type some words into Google to find your business.

What are those keywords?

Most people don’t know the name of your business so that isn’t what you should focus on. So what should you focus on? Being the solution to their problem (Martial arts lessons) in the geographic location they live (City/state).

Be sure to read my post on “title tags” to learn the right keywords to use in your title tag. The good news is that those words are the same as what you’ll want to have in the content of your website.

2.  Targeting the wrong keywords

Often times, owners target the wrong keyword terms. They are too generic and think by having “X” or “Y” on the page that is all they have to do. Or, they emphasize the name of their system.

If you live in Westminster Maryland you shouldn’t be targeting that by itself. Nor should you be targeting “Martial Arts” by itself. A much more potent way is to combine those two into one powerful combination - Westminster Maryland Martial Arts.

3. Not including the targeted keywords enough on your page

You have to put your targeted keyword phrase on the page more than once in order for the search engines to know those keywords are important to your page. As an idea, list your keyword in the following places:

1. Title Tag
2. Headline (H1 tag)
3. Sub headlines (H2 tags)
4. In the 1st paragraph
5. In the middle paragraph
6. In the last paragraph
7. File name of the HTML page (example: www.yoursite.com/keyword.html)

That said, you want to have a keyword density of about 3-5% on average. No more.

Keyword density = How many times a given keyword or keyword phrase appears on a page compared to all other words on the page.

However, the most important thing to do is make is read naturally. Don’t stuff keywords! A quick test to see if you’ve done too much is to read it out loud. You’ll know when you have over done it when you hear yourself say “did I really just say that keyword five times in two sentences?”

4.  Using the same title and description tag on every page

Each page needs to have its own unique title tag and description. Both the title tag and description tag need to describe what can be found on each page. And, I wouldn’t let your software auto generate this information, either.

Do this by hand and pick one keyword phrase per title tag. Then repeat that keyword somewhere in your meta description, preferably near the beginning.

Again, read my post on “How to Boost Your Search Engine Rankings with a Title Tag.”

5. Poor content structuring

There is a basic hierarchy with respect to content structuring that can help your organic rankings:

1. Primary headline – In HTML this is represented as <h1></h1>. Should only be used once on a page.
2. Sub headlines – In HTML this is represented as <h2></h2>. Can be used more than once.
3. Paragraph – In HTML this is represented as <p></p>.
4. Ordered and unordered lists – In HTML this is represented as <ol></ol> and <ul></ul> respectively.
5. Bolding- In HTML this is represented as <strong></strong>.
6. Italics – In HTML this is represented as <em></em>.

The HTML of a page with this markup could look something like this:

<h1>Westminster Marlyand Martial Arts</h1></div>

<h3>Learn Martial Arts at Carrol County Kenpo Karate</h3>

<p>This paragraph explains why people need to take <strong>martial arts lessons in Westminster Maryland</strong></p>

<p>Here is a list of important stuff:</p>

<ul>

<li>Martial Arts for Kids</li>

<li>Martial Arts for Adults</li>

<li>Self-Defense Lessons</li>>

</ul>

<p>Don’t forget, this <em>Westminster Martial Arts</em> stuff is important!</p>

And the final output would look like this (based on my CSS stylesheet on my site. Yours might look different):

Westminster Marlyand Martial Arts

Learn Martial Arts at Carrol County Kenpo Karate

This paragraph explains why people need to take martial arts lessons in Westminster Maryland.

Here is a list of important stuff:

• Martial Arts for Kids
• Martial Arts for Adults
• Self-Defense Lessons

Don’t forget, this Westminster Martial Arts stuff is important!

In short, the search engines send automated bots called “spiders” to your website and they crawl all of the pages on your website then they store the results they find.

Whenever someone does a search, the search engines are actually returning results they have stored in their servers about your site and others like it.

Structuring your content correctly makes the search engine’s job easier and is the basis of search engine friendly design. If you don’t structure your content properly, it will be harder for them to accurately spider, and therefore index, your pages. And that can only hurt you when it comes to your sites search engine rankings.

Most martial arts sites I review only use paragraph tags and bolding on their pages. There is a lot of opportunity for your website if you’re not doing the rest. Be sure to emphasize the keywords or keyword phrases you are targeting, not just a sampling of random words.

A Final Note on Timing

Note it can take a couple of months for your rankings to change in the search results. The search engines do this on their own time so don’t expect immediate results. In time, however, you should start to see things climbing higher. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

Did this post help you better understand search engine optimization? Let me know in the form of a comment below!

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