Mark Shay (Educational Directories Unlimited) presented a session titled “Effective Keyword Selection for Search Engine Marketing in Higher Education,†this afternoon at the EduWeb Conference in Baltimore.
Kesha Boyce Willliams, Manager of Web Services at The Cleveland Institute of Art is one of the seven very nice people who agreed to share their notes with all of us who couldn’t attend the EduWeb conference this year. This is Kesha’s first post about the conference.
1. Use free and paid search improvement strategies together. Paid search improvements (buying ad words on
Google) may yield improvements, but those are only temporary.
2. Big budget? Small budget? Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Spend money in diverse ways.
If you improve your site content and work on your design issues, that will GO A LONG WAY toward effectiveness in general and in improving search issues.
3. The goal is to be #1: Being #1 means more traffic to your site and that often translates into bonus for your BRAND. #1 must mean you’re the best, the largest, right?
4. The players: Google gets 40% of all searches, Yahoo gets 33% and MSN gets 11%. But strategies around Google only CAN’T BE THE ONLY ONES YOU HAVE.
5. Purchased keywords must have relevance to content.
6. Search Alogorithms (the formulas that run search engines) Are ALWAYS CHANGING. KEEP UP WITH THE CHANGES. Google may be the “WAY” now but 5 years from now it will be something completely different.
7. Paid searching does mean increased visibility only.
8. Remember that people search your site DIFFERENTLY than you do. The word “Program” may mean absolutely nothing. Try changing program to degree. People search for nursing degree, architecture degree, journalism degree, etc.
9. GET IT RIGHT on the 1st page. Primary page content will get you more results than fixing things on your 10th level page.
10. Use traffic logs to inform you about how people use search engines to land our your site.
THE BIG NEWS!! – Research shows students visit your site an average of 35 times from DISCOVERY to their FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL. So, you have to get it right.
In the hope of creating a little back channel where there appears to be none, can I ask Kesha two questions: 1) What research was sited to get the 35 number of visits to a .edu before the student hits campus and 2) I assume that is for high school students coming in as first-year students, correct?
Thanks for blogging this!!