At ALOS we work hard on the search rankings of our website, so that we can reach a wider audience and bring our school’s language and translation services to more people. Here we share a few tips you can apply in your own academy or centre.
Organic SEO ranking is a long-haul job that takes a great deal of dedication. The reward is ranking well on internet search engines (Google above all) and appearing in prominent positions when users run certain searches. At ALOS we use a number of tips and strategies that work very well for us and keep our language school in Valencia well placed online.
Regular blog content for better rankings
Our blog is a very important part of the website. As well as producing valuable content on a regular basis, we do so with SEO criteria in mind, which helps our texts rank well. We offer content on current affairs, the secrets of language teaching, new technologies, our course catalogue, options in the professional translation sector and more. We want readers to find interesting material that gives them useful new knowledge. And, on top of that, helps our page rank.
Benchmark keywords
One of the keys to SEO is the use of relevant keywords. At ALOS we work with around half a dozen keywords that help our content rank. After many years of work we have found the ones that are most valuable and that perform best, in line with search trends. Which ones? That is part of the secret behind good SEO work at ALOS, but we can reveal one that is as useful as it is surprising: “language school”. This keyword generates a lot of traffic and derives from a search made on a massive scale across Spain: “escuela oficial de idiomas” (the state-run official language school). When users look for language courses, they tend to turn to the official schools in their city, which has made that term highly relevant.
Image tagging and care
Written content on a website is essential, but so are its images. It is very important to have suitable, well-prepared photographs. First of all, it is advisable to upload them at a sensible size, with dimensions and a resolution suited to the web. Heavy images only slow down loading times and harm your rankings. Image tagging and metadata also need attention. File names should be descriptive, so that search engines “understand” what is in the image. Finally, the ideal web format is JPG, although images in other formats (such as PNG) are also widely used.
User-friendly URLs
Lastly, a general tip for your language school website: use short, descriptive, straightforward URLs on all your pages. Page slugs should be direct and simple, with no need for determiners or numbers. For example, the URL of this page is short and to the point, stripping out unnecessary terms that add no information: alosidiomas.com/trucos-posicionamiento-escuela-idiomas. What do you make of these tips for improving your website’s rankings? As you can see, these are simple habits for maintaining and looking after your site that will get you appearing in more related searches. And remember that you can contact us for a quote on any of our courses, translations or language services.