SEO Odds & Ends Thursday: The Stepping Stone School
For the second edition of my blog series, I came across a local Austin site that is a prime example of how marketing efforts combined with a great industry presence can achieve adequate search engine presence. The Stepping Stone School is a highly recognized preschool, established in 1979, currently with 17 locations around Austin, TX. Their partnerships, accreditations, and other marketing and community efforts have given them a good presence within search engine results pages and likely a good flow of traffic from search engines. With a few tweaks, they could probably increase their site traffic, and therefore extend their reach, by at least 20%.
These are a few steps I would recommend to optimize their site more fully:
1. Optimize title tags with relevant terms (keywords)
As always, this is my first stop when giving recommendations 
It’s the easiest and most important step in optimization. All of the title tags currently read “Stepping Stone School – The Smart Choice!” By being more descriptive of the pages within the title tags, this site could alert the search engines to the content of the pages.
- Page 1: Homepage
- Potential Title Tag:
Austin Preschool and Child Care | Austin, Texas | Stepping Stone School - Potential Value:
Up to 10,000 visitors/month for keywords “Austin Preschool”, “Austin Child Care”, “Texas Childcare”.
- Potential Title Tag:
- Page 2: Why We’re the Best
- Potential Title Tag:
Childcare Accreditation | Austin, Texas | Stepping Stone School - Potential Value:
Up to 1,600 visitors/month.
- Potential Title Tag:
2. Request more descriptive links from partners and other sources
If you are reading this blog, you know that (to the search engines) links to a site are more important than the content on that site. For some sites, building new links is the most important initiative; however, if you have an active marketing department or are a contributor to your community in other ways, you may want to put your efforts into tapping into the partnerships you have and improving links that exist already. Stepping Stone School is a good example of this because they have sponsored various events over the years. See the two links below for opportunities to increase their search engine benefit to Stepping Stone School.
As a sponsor of the local Austin Thundercloud Turkey Trot last year, Stepping Stone likely received a link on the event website as part of the promotion package. This is a great opportunity to use a more descriptive word in the anchor text, and usually sponsorships of this sort are flexible in what they will list, if you ask.
- Potential Link Request: Replace the phrase “Stepping Stone School” with “Stepping Stone Childcare Center” or “Austin Stepping Stone Preschool” on the event page.
Stepping Stone School also is an existing sponsor of this after school organization in Central Texas, and has again received a link–this time an image link–back to the site. Both text links and image links can be optimized; image links can be optimized by altering the alt attribute of the image to include a descriptive phrase of the site the image is linking to. This text is readable to the search engines, and is also used when the image cannot be viewed. For the Stepping Stone School logo, a descriptive alt attribute could be “Austin Stepping Stone Preschool logo” or “Childcare Center, Stepping Stone Preschool logo, located in Austin, Texas”.
- Potential Link Request: Add an ALT attribute to the linked logo image, with code such as this:
<a href="http://www.steppingstoneschool.com"><img src="steppingstone.jpg" alt="Austin Stepping Stone Preschool" /></a>
3. Create a YouTube Channel
Finally, sites such as Stepping Stone’s can absolutely benefit from the branding as well as additional opportunity to rank in Google’s Universal Search results by further promoting their existing videos. I would recommend Stepping Stone School create a YouTube channel, and upload any promotional and informational videos available. For example, Stepping Stone School has Enrichment programs that parents may benefit from seeing before they contact the school–I would be interested in seeing a few minutes of a Computer Technology class for 3-5 year olds! Beyond text testimonials, video testimonials add credibility and another opportunity for visibility online.
Of course, any online promotion of an organization such as this would have to consider the safety of the students above all else. These are a few tips that should be applicable to a variety of sites, organizations, or companies. If you would like to submit your site for consideration for a future Odds & Ends Wednesday feature, please email me at: king at apogee-search dot com.
