August 27, 2013

Higher Ed SEO: Your Guide to Google’s Never-ending Updates

Aug. 27, 2013 at 08:00 AM | By Hannah Wilkey | Comment Count

Have you ever worked tirelessly to rank well on Google just to loose the site traffic you produced a few weeks later? Understanding how to set up your site using white-hat SEO tactics is the first step to avoiding being blacklisted from Google updates.

When executed correctly, SEO is a powerful tool to drive awareness and generate interest with potential students. Institutions and schools use search engine optimization (SEO) as a way to maximize the number of impressions of their brand and traffic to their site. Google has released a series of updates you may have heard of known as Panda, Penguin, and the notorious Phantom. These updates are meant to help Google ensure searchers receive the most relevant, up-to-date, and valuable results to whatever they are searching for. In more technical terms, updates are designed to uncover sites and/or pages of sites that use SEO incorrectly and blacklist them from search engine results pages.

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Be forewarned, if any aspect of your site’s SEO (the CODE, CONTENT, or CREDIBILITY) is manipulated or carried out incorrectly, your website and brand has and will likely suffer from Google updates, and, recovery could be a long, grueling, and stressful process.

Provided below is a list of must-knows and Hobsons’ guide to using SEO properly and effectively on your institution’s site. As an added bonus, following these simple best practices can help you avoid getting penalized by Google’s next update:

Code

Use your .edu to your advantage- Educational institutions are at an advantage in organic search listings above other web properties because .edu’s are automatically given more credibility than .coms or .nets on educational topics. Credibility in Google’s terms is a site’s right to be a trustful source on a certain topic. Use this advantage to your favor and build microsites off of the .edu instead of creating a new .com. Using a .com will not raise alarm with Google, but driving organic traffic is easier from a .edu.
Accurate TITLE tags and META information - When developing page titles and meta information, ensure they properly summarize the content on the page. Meta information that doesn’t properly map to page content will result in a high bounce rate and low time on page because the user is expecting to read more about what the meta summary implies. If the content in your meta information differs from the content on your site, you can expect your visitors to bounce quickly. This is an immediate red flag for Google. One last thing, make sure your page title tags and meta information are unique to each page of the site to avoid raising alarm.

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Content

Avoid Creating Templates for Large Amounts of Content - While it will likely take less time and resources on the front-end to create a program or location template, this practice makes your site susceptible to consequences for publishing duplicate content. When setting up your site to address programs or locations, write about the unique selling points of each program or campus. Consider what will be most useful to the site visitor, a crucial aspect of responsive design, and make that the center point of the page content. If three programs you have only differ slightly, consider grouping them all on the same page and speaking to the slight differences in the copy instead of giving each program their own page.
Natural Writing - Ensure all content is written with the human user in mind. The days of keyword loading are long gone. Although placing your keywords in your copy should always be in the back of your mind, make sure you aren’t adding them in just for SEO purposes. Placing keywords within copy should appear natural within the flow of the content.
Ensure Content is Original - Ensure the content on your site isn’t copied from other online sources as well as add the rel=author tag to help the search engines quickly identify you as the owner of the content in case others try to pass off your content as their own.

Credibility

External Linking Sites - A large quantity of high quality links pointing to your site from external sites will boost your organic search efforts if naturally acquired. Warning sirens go off to the search engines if a large amount of links are acquired at the same time or if the links all come from sites owned by the same parent company. Some tips for acquiring external site links naturally are to use social networking to spread content beyond your site. While social media links are ‘no-follow,’ it’s an inexpensive and effective way to share your information with others. In addition, work with your partner associations and public relations departments to include backlinks on articles, press releases, and op-eds that mention your institution.

Learn how to incorporate social with these pointers on higher education marketing strategy development.

Above all, plan, build, and optimize your site for the end user always. By doing so, you’ll save yourself a lot of time, budget, and headache when the next Google update strikes. When it does, actively monitoring your Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools accounts for shifts in activity. This will allow you to discover any issues with one of your site pages and afford the opportunity to remedy the problem immediately.

Read how the University of Wisconsin-Superior and University of Wisconsin-Stout leverage Google Analytics in their communications strategies.

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