HIGHER ED SEO TIPS: POWER UP ONLINE

VISIBILITY By. Jordan LowryDigital Marketing Analyst

SEO AND HIGHER EDUCATION Higher education institutions are beginning to

realize the true value of SEO. Unfortunately, the SEO landscape is volatile and

ever changing. However, there are some best practices which have been fairly consistent over the last couple of years.

We believe that these best practices will continue to be relevant throughout 2016 and work to improve online visibility.

KEYWORD RESEARCH AND TARGETING URL’S

To get started first conduct keyword research which will drive content creation.

Start with a free keyword research tool from SEObook.

This tool pulls data from Google and Bing’s databases.

KEYWORD RESEARCH AND TARGETING URL’S

Next, you want to build an appropriate page around a theme of closely related keywords.

These keywords should relate to educational programs your University offers.

KEYWORD RESEARCH AND TARGETING URL’S

A PDF is not an appropriate landing page.

Rather than a dedicated landing page, one University had downloadable PDF’s of their courses.

The alternative is to build a landing page around your keywords and include conversion points.

AVOID DUPLICATE CONTENT

AVOID DUPLICATE CONTENT Google admits that 25-30% of the internet is

duplicated content. However, we can still take measures to avoid this.

AVOID DUPLICATE CONTENT To get an idea if your site

has duplicate content simply use Siteliner to run a quick diagnostic.

I can see this college has around 10% duplicated content but, the free version this tool will only look at 250 pages.

AVOID DUPLICATE CONTENT A way to fix this is to write unique copy on key pages and

block unnecessary pages from being crawled by search engines with a robots.txt file.

The robots.txt is a nifty text file you can create to instruct search engine robots on where and where not to crawl your site.

GET A GRIP ON LOCAL VISIBILITY

Colleges are not immune from the types of competition businesses face online. As you can see competition is fierce. 

GET A GRIP ON LOCAL VISIBILITY

There are a lot of different options for any prospective student deciding on where to further their education. 

Local visibility or local SEO has risen in prominence over the last several years. 

But how can Higher Educational Institutions benefit?

GET A GRIP ON LOCAL VISIBILITY

Google has begun to provide more individualized search features. 

These personalized features are based on a person’s geographic location and search history. 

GET A GRIP ON LOCAL VISIBILITY

You can take advantage of this by: Local Citation Corrections - Your first job is to make sure your

college’s address is easily found on key pages. Then you need to ensure it is listed correctly throughout the web.

GET A GRIP ON LOCAL VISIBILITY

Local Content - Once your Higher Ed’s citations are handled it’s time to produce local content.

It’s important this content resonates with your audience.  Maybe you build a page dedicated to ‘College Life’ and talk about

activities around your college’s campus.

DON’T BLOCK IMPORTANT RESOURCES

Blocking content that is important to searchers within search engines is detrimental.

A common way to block important information is with a robots.txt file.

DON’T BLOCK IMPORTANT RESOURCES

A robots.txt file is a simple file which holds pretty significant power.

This file controls how search engines initially crawl a website when they first visit.

However as you can imagine it can be pretty easy to block important resources you would otherwise want indexed. 

DON’T BLOCK IMPORTANT RESOURCES

To check this simply type your domain name “example.com/robots.txt”. 

Remember replace “example.com” with your Universities domain name.

DON’T BLOCK IMPORTANT RESOURCES

A good rule of thumb is to not block key pages from search engines with a robots.txt file. 

For example, you would not want to block important categories such as, Admissions, Academics or Athletics sections.

Keep in mind, if you use Google Site Search as your internal site search, blocking a section with the robots.txt file will also prevent it from showing up properly in your internal search as well.

SEO FOR HIGHER EDUCATION Higher Educational institutions may not take digital

marketing or search engine optimization into consideration. However, no website is immune from the grasps of Google.

SEO FOR HIGHER EDUCATION Take advantage of digital marketing and SEO to get in front

of more prospective students. Related Posts

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nce?