Your school has a great Web site but nobody outside of your school's community knows it's there. So how exactly do you get people to find it and visit?
Join Associations
Most schools join their state or regional independent school association. It's also a good idea to join national associations such as NAIS, TABS, NAPSEC, AACS and others. Keep your contact information and Web site address current in those listings.
Directory Listings
Listings on sites like this one are free and offer wide exposure to a world-wide audience. Paid listings in old line directories such as Petersons.com and The Bunting and Lyon Blue Book also get you lots of attention especially from education professionals and consultants.
Listings on a website such as Boarding School Review and its sister site Private School Review are a must these days. Make sure your listing is complete and appealing. It is also worth spending money on their paid advertisements too.
Optimize Your Website
While this sounds highly technical, it's really simple and very effective. After all, when somebody types your school name into a search window, you want your school to appear in the top ten search results of the thousands of results those search engines produce. Here's how to do it.
Refine Your Meta Tags
It doesn't matter if you know what meta means. Just tell your website designer/guru to show you what he has for keywords and description. These are the critical meta tags which search engines index when they crawl your site.
Meta Keywords
Let's assume your school is St. Swithin's in Wolcott, Connecticut. You will probably want to include keywords such as:
education, private school, St. Swithin's School, Wolcott, Connecticut, college, prep, day, coed, independent school
Separate the keywords with punctuation. Don't repeat words.
Meta Description
The meta description is nothing more than a little blurb written to entice the reader to explore your site further. Something like "St. Swithin's School, located in historic Wolcott, Connecticut, was founded in 1889 by Miss Alice Griswold. It was originally a school for young ladies but has evolved over the years to become a coeducational institution offering grades 6 through 12."
Test It!
See how your school ranks. Try these two quick tests for yourself. First, go to google.com and type your school's name in the search window. Press Enter. Is your school displayed in the top ten results? Hopefully it is. If not, optimize the meta tags as I have suggested above. Next - and this is the acid test as far as I am concerned - key in the following search string in the Google search window: private school YourTown
Did your school turn up in the top ten? In the top 20? Not at all? That's the point of keyword optimization. If done right, it will push your school up into the top ten search results. You will have to allow a couple of weeks for the search engines to find your site once you have made the changes to your meta tags.
To Sum Up
Marketing your school successfully in today's highly competitive environment requires presenting your message in many different ways. Think outside the box. Network like mad! Your school will get noticed.
