With the impending end of the world (just kidding), now’s a good time to get started on your college website’s SEO needs. Three months into 2012, we’ve drafted a search engine optimization checklist to follow for the rest of the year.

Here are some basic tips for starting an effective SEO campaign:

Define goals
Defining and establishing clear website goals is the essential first step when trying to optimize your program pages and boost your college’s online presence. Knowing what you’re trying to achieve can help guide your choices for Web design, content and keyword research, among other tactics and tools.

A competitive analysis and a full strategic website audit can help you understand where your program pages are and where they have to go. Click here to request a free website audit. 

Keyword research
Once you have clearly defined and established your goals, you will have to focus on keyword research, developing a list of keywords that will help you rank well for relevant search queries.

Clearly, the more popular the keywords, the higher the search volume. However, these keywords will also be much more competitive. A good tactic, therefore, is to focus on long-tail keyword phrases. Long-tail keywords are often less competitive than generic keywords, providing quick ranking results. They can also be better targeted to specific audiences, which can improve click-through rate and lead conversion.

Consistent, exciting content
With goals and keywords defined, the next logical step is to develop exciting and engaging keyword-rich content. With your target audience in mind, consider what topics and content are most relevant, and set out to create program pages and blog posts that offer the most representative and informative (and keyword-rich) content possible.

Remember, content does not necessarily have to be text. Use visuals, videos and audio when you can to enliven your net presence (and always follow traditional SEO best practices when doing so)

The other thing to keep is mind is frequency. The more content you produce (a blog can be a good channel for frequently updated content), the better you’ll rank. Search engines, after all, like fresh content.

Socialize!
Now more than ever, your school has to be involved on social media sites. From Facebook and Twitter to Flickr and YouTube, if you’re not taking advantage of major social media platforms, you’re not communicating with one of your major target audiences: prospective students. New research suggests that a majority of students will check out a school’s Facebook page when considering to apply. It is essential that your marketing and recruiting message is being communicated on these channels.

It’s important to note that a successful social media plan requires times and persistence. It isn’t enough to simply have a profile (particularly now, with Facebook’s new Timeline format giving schools the chance to pin major stories and create timelines and milestones), your college has to be present, maintaining a presence and engaging and leading a community.

Focus on quality backlinks
A backlink (also known as an Inbound link) is a link directed towards your program pages from other sites. Backlinks are among the most important ranking factors for search engines, helping to decide where to rank a web page in search results. Search engines, however, will give more credit to “quality backlinks”. This means that sites directing links to you must have content that is related to your site. If they do, those backlinks are considered more relevant. The higher the relevance of the backlinks, the greater their quality.

So, while you may be tempted to go out and get as many links as possible, it’s actually a better idea to focus on acquiring quality links. Keep this in mind: 100 niche, geo-targeted links can be just as effective as 1000 random, low-relevance backlinks. It’s quality, not quantity that works.

Look Beyond Google
Sure, Google reigns supreme, but that doesn’t mean you have to ignore other traffic sources and search engines, most especially Bing and Yahoo, whose alliance helped generate an increase in market share. Clearly, they’re not giving up on this “search engine war”, and they will continue to nip at Google’s heels, particularly now that many are displeased with Google’s new privacy policies.

A diverse SEO and link building campaign can ensure that your college isn’t putting all its marketing eggs in one basket. Your audience is scattered across the Internet, and the Net is constantly evolving. Your SEO and link building efforts, therefore, have to be diverse and varied, including blog posts and comments, social media, press releases and more.

Keep Page Load Time in Mind
As Google says, “Speed matters. Faster loading pages mean more visitors land on your site instead of waiting in frustration or leaving.” Essentially, the faster your program pages load, the more popular they will be…and the better they will rank. Google uses page load speed as a factor in how it ranks websites. Put a premium on quick-loading, user-friendly program pages and Google will reward you.

What other suggestions do you have for our SEO checklist?

CATEGORIES: Blog

Tags: College Marketing Coordinator Tips, Education Marketing, Education Marketing Tips, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, Web Design, Website Audit

Everything can use a good update now and again, and Web design is no different. Like school curriculums, facilities and other admin and marketing resources and materials, your college website will need to be freshened up and redesigned on occasion. A redesign ensures that your program pages are up-to-date with SEO and current Web design best practices.

If you’re thinking of redesigning your website, however, there are a few things you should consider before starting:

1. Understand where you are
   By leveraging Google Analytics, you should already know the strengths and weaknesses of your college or university website. What is working for you? What isn’t? Understanding where you are will make it easier for you to figure out where you have to go.
2. Define your website goals
   Aside from providing clarity, defining goals also helps make it easier to track the effectiveness of your marketing and online campaigns. Knowing what you’re trying to achieve is the easiest way to get a plan in place.
3. Know your audience
   Once you know what you’re trying to achieve, you have to know what audience you’re trying to reach. This distinction will help guide your choice of content, as well as a host of other design features.
4. Analyze your competition
   Before redesigning, it’s a good idea to analyze the competitive landscape. Find out what other college and university websites are doing: what do their sites say about their school? How are they laid out? How do they look? By isolating what you think best fits your goals, you can get a wealth of inspiration from what’s already out there.

With these ideas in mind, here are a few things you should do when redesigning your school website:

Focus on clarity and simplicity
User-friendly Web design should be the ultimate goal of any redesigning effort. Don’t bury content and information in unnecessarily complex design. Keep navigation and site architecture simple and clear, with plenty of visual clues and easily understandable links. Don’t be confusing.

Offer easy-to-find info and contacts
Don’t make it difficult for visitors to find information or to contact staff and faculty. Make pertinent school information easy to find and use, and your visitors will do just that.

Use 301s
Once you’ve redesigned your web site, you don’t want to lose pages that are ranking well on search engine results pages. Using 301s, however, you can redirect traffic from these old pages to new pages. 301 code is interpreted as a “permanent move” to a new location.

Update your website goals
Should there be changes to the URLs of your program pages, make sure that you also update your website goals to reflect these changes. Without this important step, the tracking and measurement of your website performance will not be accurate.

Emphasize school colors/logo
Whether or not you are rebranding your college or university, your redesign should emphasize the school’s logo and color scheme. This will help future brand identity initiatives and help give your college’s online presence a unique visual component.

Write for the web
Content may be king, but badly written text can easily cut off the royal bloodlines. New text (or updated old text) has to conform to Web writing best practices, and by that we mean:

• Concise text
• Paragraph breaks
• Headlines and categories
• Highlighted keywords
• Bullet lists
• Simple language

For more on writing for the Web, check out this entertaining chat between Sage and Rocky Lewis:

Integrate multimedia
Text is essential, but too much of it can force visiting eyes to glaze over. Make your site more dynamic with pictures, videos and audio. The more you mix and play with multimedia, the more engaging your program pages will be.

Focus on social media
As we’ve pointed out recently, a comprehensive social media plan is now a necessity for colleges and universities. Any redesign must have fully integrated social media components, buttons and calls to action. A school blog (or a series of student blogs) can also be a very important feature to include in any school site redesign.

Go Mobile
We’ve been saying for some time now that the future was mobile, well the future is now. A redesign of your college’s website must include mobile-friendly components or a mobile app.

What to avoid when redesigning your college website:

While it’s important to include certain elements, it’s just as important to make sure you avoid some of the following:

• Broken links – It can happen during a redesign, but make sure that all broken links are removed or fixed.
• “Under construction” signs – If you’re not ready to go live with something, don’t put it up.
• Out of date info – We know that things change quickly, but if you’re going to the trouble of redesigning a school website, you have to make sure that information (regarding courses, staff, faculty and events) has also been updated.

What else do you think is important when redesigning your college website?

CATEGORIES: Blog

Tags: Education Marketing, Education Marketing Tips, Web Design

Everyone wants a flashy, visually stimulating website. But the truth is, the success of your school site and program pages will most likely be determined by one thing: usability. If a visitor does not know how to use a feature on your site, what’s the point of having it? User-centric design, therefore, has become the most important approach in the development of websites.

Before we get into some Web design basics, you should know a few general things about Internet users.

Website visitors:

• Appreciate quality
  Quality content helps create credibility and trust, and can sometimes even overcome clumsy design. Focus on creating quality content. Remember “Content is King”.
• Scan pages
  Most users only scan the page, searching for fixed points or anchors that can guide them through the site. There is an element of instant gratification here, and if your site doesn’t meet user expectations, they will leave and look elsewhere.
• Want control
  Probably more than anything, users want to control their browser. Don’t bombard them with pop-ups and obstacles.

With these in mind, here are some tips to improving usability in your web design:

Keep it simple
This should be the guiding principle of your site design. Remember that users, who only scan pages, are looking for quality content. Don’t bury it in unnecessarily complex design. Keep things simple.

Every page, in other words, should be self-explanatory. The goal should be for clear navigation and site architecture that provides visual clues and easily understandable links. Don’t confuse your users.

Make it obstacle-free
The patience of your visitors is a finite thing, and you don’t want to squander that. The less action required from users to experience your content, the more likely they will. Let users explore your site without forcing them to create accounts, register or download PDF files.

Use visuals
Some aspects of your user interface attract more attention than others. Try, where possible, to break up text with images, videos and paragraph breaks. Aside from making it easier to read, this will also help attract the eye.

Focus on effective Web writing
When populating your site, try to use:

• Short paragraphs
• Concise phrases
• Categories and headers
• Bullet lists
• Highlighted keywords
• Simple language

It’s also a good idea to use a fixed font size throughout the site and to change the color of visited links. These may seem like small things, but they all add up and improve the overall experience on your site.

Use calls-to-action
No matter what the goal (signing up to newsletter or driving people to social media/blog), calls-to-action can get people’s attention. Make visual cues to these actionable buttons or forms to get the most conversion / lead generation.

Be consistent
Don’t make every program page a new learning experience for your visitors. A lack of consistency throughout your school site will only frustrate users. Be consistent and users will quickly understand what to expect from your site’s navigation, structure, text and search features, among other areas.

Test everything!
Let’s put this simply: if you want a great website, you have to test its usability on a regular basis. Test, fix and text again. This process has to be repeated on a continuous basis. Usability testing provides insights into issues that may not have been noticeable in the design and development stage.

What other tactics has your school done to improve the usability of its website?

CATEGORIES: Blog

Tags: Education Marketing Tips, Web Design