SEO Strategy

This document is in draft and is subject to change.

Keywords

• Popular keywords and phrases for primary source sets in general (source: Google Trends, Google autocomplete)
  
  • primary source
  • primary document
  • lesson plan
  • lesson plan example
  • lesson plan sample
  • lesson plan template
  • curriculum planning tool
  • teaching tool
  • online teaching tool
  • teaching guide
  • teacher guide
  • classroom activity
  • classroom activity ideas
  • fun classroom activity
  • discussion questions
  • discussion topics
  • history
  • american history
  • english
  • literature
  • guided research
  • guided analysis
  • middle school
  • high school 
  • undergraduate
• Each set will also have subject-specific keywords
• Where to use these keywords
  • URLs
  • Title tag (especially at beginning)
  • Meta description tag (especially at beginning)
  • Headers (especially at beginning)
  • First paragraph of content (especially first sentence)
  • Last paragraph of content
  • Image file names and alt tags
  • Anywhere in the content (optimally 2-5%)

Web pages

• Good HTML structure
• Descriptive, human-readable URLs
• Images should have descriptive names and alt tags
• Make all pages mobile compatible
• Specify canonical link for any pages that might have additional params (ie. filters)
• Include unique title and meta description tags for each page
• Code schema.org markup into HTML pages
• Optimize page load time

Site structure

• Make sure primary sources sets get included in XML sitemap
• Breadcrumbs
• Maximize internal links to primary source sets
• Clean up broken links
• Shallow nesting in sitemap (primary source sets nested directly under root URL)

Server settings

• Support If-Modified-Since HTTP header

Content

• High reading level
• Free of spelling/grammatical errors
• Quality outbound links
• Audio and video content
• Site research sources

Marketing

• Links from other high-authority sites
  • Our social media sites
  • Guest blog?
  • Other opportunities to promote primary source sets on other websites?

Analytics

• Track time spent on page, bounce rate, exit rate