Search Engine Optimization:
Why and how to optimize your college’s article in Wikipedia

Yahoo! showed its strong interest for Wikipedia in announcing an important gift in hardware and resources in a joint press release last week:

Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization that develops and maintains free open content for the public, and Yahoo! Search, a leading global search engine, today announced that Yahoo! Search will dedicate hardware and resources to support Wikipedia, a community based encyclopedia written and edited by people from around the world. The contribution is the most significant dedication made to date to the Wikimedia Foundation by a corporate sponsor and is essential to furthering their global growth.

In addition, Wikipedia content will become available to hundreds of millions of users worldwide through Yahoo! Search via shortcuts that are automatically displayed above the relevant search results. Yahoo! will begin making Wikipedia content available via shortcuts in the U.S., select European, Asian, and Latin American properties over the next several weeks.

As a consequence, this newly found support for the community-based encyclopedia will also increase dramatically the “search engine optimization” capital of any Wikipedia article.

This means that more and more people will read the Wikipedia article about your higher education institution.

So, now is probably a good time for your marketing/communication office to make sure the Wikipedia article about your college or university gives an accurate picture of your institution.

After reviewing what’s already in Wikipedia for your institution (you can find it in the full list of US universities and colleges), they will be able to repurpose and adapt the content prepared and updated each year for print college guides.

The Wikipedia people have even made the task easier by coming up with a template and a set of detailed guidelines for articles about colleges and universities:

• Introduction
• Campus
• Students and faculty
• Sports, clubs, and traditions
• History
• Noted alumni
• Noted faculty
• External links

Here are a couple examples of Wikipedia articles for universities:

• Saint Jose State University
• Carnegie Mellon University

Anyone can edit an article in this encyclopedia. So, the article will evolve over time – hopefully in the right direction -, but your marketing/communication office should definitely check it for accuracy from time to time.