An Introduction to SEO for Tutors

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it’s the art of ensuring that your website ranks well for specific keywords in search engines. Whether you intend on creating your own website or not, it’s important to understand how the tutoring platforms that you advertise on optimize their websites to ensure your listings are found by students and parents.

Developing a high ranking website is a creative process that blends art and science in a balanced mix and contains many different elements. This blend has to satisfy both people and search engines, which can be a tricky combination.

A well-optimized website should be:

• Highly readable by visitors

• Highly visible to search engines, and therefore

• Commercially successful for you

One of the most common traps websites owners fall into is ‘keyword-stuffing’ whereby they try to fit as many keywords into their content as possible in the hope that Google will reward them kindly for it. Websites must always have the reader as priority, which makes good SEO sense as well as good business sense.

SEO specifically targets the words and phrases people use when searching for a product or service on the internet. It’s every webmaster’s dream to rank number one in Google and with properly targeted, keyword-savvy content, search engines are more likely to index websites generously.

Internet search engines are developing new technologies and algorithms all the time in order to make search methodologies smarter and more astute. Following Google’s Penguin and Panda updates, Google robots no longer give significance to the repetition of words throughout a website. Instead, they focus on content which has meaning, makes grammatical sense and provides genuinely useful information. These updates have forced webmasters to improve their website content or suffer the consequences of a dramatic drop in traffic.

Here are our top tips for creating highly optimized web pages:

Research your Keywords and Phrases

Use keyword analysis tools such as Google’s Keyword Planner or paid tools like SEMRush, you can focus on specific keywords you want to rank for. Keyword analysis tools are easy to use and give you a good idea of what search terms people are using to find private tutors in your local area. These tools also tell you how much traffic each search term generates. Here’s an example of how Google’s Keyword planner displays keyword information:

Google’s Keyword Planner is the perfect tool for researching your keywords

Researching your keywords is a great way to plan how you will optimize your website for search engines. You should use keywords in your page headlines, meta information and occasionally in your website content. Don’t go crazy with this though as there is such a thing as over-optimizing by keyword stuffing and this won’t do you any favours in search engine rankings.

Action – Do Keyword Research for Your Local Area

1. Using Google’s Keyword Planner, or similar tools, search for keywords that people in your area might use to find a private tutor.

2. Filter the results by monthly search volume and export the list as a CSV excel document.

3. Make use of these keywords in your website copy, landing pages and blog posts but be careful not to overuse them as keyword stuffing is viewed negatively by Google and could get your website penalised.

On-Page SEO

On page SEO, means optimizing particular web pages for search engines from a technical and semantic perspective. Some of the things you can do to improve the SEO of the pages on your website include:

• Updating your meta titles and descriptions to accurately reflect the keywords and content of each page

• Having keyword rich headlines (that are still readable) and using synonyms of these keywords within the sub headings of your pages

• Structuring your pages correctly by giving your main headline a ‘headline’ h1 tag, your subheadings and h2 tag and any other sub categories, h3 tags etc.

• Internally linking your blog posts by using anchor text to direct people to other articles of interest within your blog

• Making your posts as comprehensive as possible so that Google sees them as authoritative

• Making use of images on your blog and giving them the appropriate image attributes and alt text.

One of the best articles I've read about page ranking factors is on the Moz websitehttp://moz.com/learn/seo/on-page-factors. Although it gets a bit technical at times, everything you need to know about on page SEO can be found here.

Action – Revise Your Old Website Content

1. If you already have a website, spend some time working on each landing page and blog post and implement as many of the elements mentioned above as you can.

2. Identify opportunities within each piece of content to internally link to another page. This encourages Google to crawl your website - more info on this below.

3. Apply these on-page SEO techniques to every new piece of content that you create on your website and create internal links in appropriate places within your posts.

If you choose to have a website, you should also make use of a blog. After publishing your blog posts, start building links to your content.

Share your post on social media networks such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Each backlink you build to your pages will result in a greater chance of your website being placed high in search engines.

Also consider the fact that if your content is good, other websites will link to it naturally.

Action – Identify Backlinking Opportunities

1. Using a backlink checker tool like the one on the Ahrefs website, enter your website URL and export all your site’s current backlinks.

2. Choose three of your competitors and do the same with their websites. This will present you with a list of backlinks to pursue that your competitors have already secured.

3. Decide on the best way to pursue these backlinks whether it be through guest blogging, name checking in articles, sharing infographics or simply asking to be added as a resource on their site.

Point to Existing Content in New Articles

If your newest article covers a topic that falls within the content of an existing article then take full advantage of anchor links by pointing back to the previous post. Not only will you give your readers additional value through the linked content but search engines will be able to dig deep into your website and apply a higher value to your post.

Always Create Valuable Content

Although the value of your content isn’t directly understood by search engines it is valuable to other website owners. When others start linking back to your content from their own websites, you’ll want your content to provide real insight. Likewise, social media interaction is quickly becoming a major relevancy factor on the web; valuable content is more likely to be shared by other people.

Guest Posting on Other Websites

Any online marketer with more than 6 years’ experience under their belt will remember the days when creating backlinks to your website (or any online profiles) was as simple as asking for an exchange – you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.

Fast forward to the present day and Google now takes a dim view of any so-called ‘black hat’ linking strategies. Google’s aim is to rank websites based on their value and authority, not necessarily on how many links they have, so nowadays the best way to gain backlinks is to have great content.

The better the content on your website, the more natural backlinks you’ll gather. The only problem with this strategy is that it takes time. So, what the savviest of marketers do is write content for other people’s websites. This has two clear marketing benefits:

1. Your services get exposure to a whole new audience

2. The author bio in your post will provide you with a link back to your website

The best way to find websites to guest post on is to search for people offering similar services to yours, and in the case of private tutoring, the closer they are to you geographically, the better, as their website visitors are likely to be local to you (unless you’re marketing yourself specifically as on online tutor).

Simply asking a fellow tutor (who teaches different subjects from you) if you can write a post for them is usually all it takes to gain you a valuable, targeted backlink that Google will reward you for.