seo for the modern college newsroom

SEO for the Modern College NewsroomGet More Out Of Your News

Kyle James@KyleJames

CEO @nuCloudFounder @eduGuru

Who Am I?

If people can’t find it, does it matter?

Search Engine Optimization

Over 3 billion searches per day!

We Have Lots Of Audiences Alumni Current Students Future Students

Faculty/Staff Board Members Sports Fans

Let’s Not Forget The News

Journalist Work Under Tight Deadlines

Journalist Rely On Search Engines

"Ultimately, PR-related usability comes down to a simple question: Why spend a fortune on outbound PR (trying to pitch journalists) when you neglect simple steps to increase the effectiveness of inbound PR (satisfying journalists who visit your website)?"

http://www.nngroup.com/articles/press-area-usability/

The Rankings Number Game

The Biggest Stack Wins

Content is an Annuity

How You Can Compete

Presentation Two Parts

1. 2.

What SEO is NOT

SEO is Usability and Accessibility

Search Engine Crawlers are Blind

Google

Yahoo Microsoft

By the Numbers (on one site)• 30% of traffic is delivered by Search

Engines

• 70% of that traffic is delivered by Google

• On a large college website w/ 1,000,000 visits per month that is 300,000 visitors

Long Tail Keywords

• Computer Science• Computer Science Major• Computer Science Degree• Computer Science Program South Carolina• Computer Science Degree South Carolina

Two Parts of SEO

On-Page Off-Page

On-Page Optimization

Headers

PageTitle

MetaDescription

MetaKeywords

URL

Page Title

• Describes The Page• Include Keywords• 70 Character Limit

PageTitle

URL

• Describe The Page• Include Keywords• A Dynamic URL is hard to understand

• What are the following two pages about?• http://www.college.edu/newsroom/president-obama-visits-campus/ • http://www.college.edu/newsroom.aspx&content_id=4225972

URL

Headers• Semantic Markup• Include Keywords• Describe sections of the Page

Headers

Semantic Markup:Think Like Word

Meta Description & Keywords

• Unique for Each Page• Only Viewable in Source• Meta Description limit 150 characters• Meta Keyword limit 10 keywords max

MetaDescription

MetaKeywords

Search Call To Actions

Page Title

Meta Description

Page Title and Meta Description are all you get in search results. Make sure that they count.

Meta Keywords

No major search engine still gives authority to them but they are a great

way to categorize your content.

Off-Page Optimization

We’ve all heard Content is King, so Links must be the Queen?

Off-Page Optimization

1. Inbound Links2. Site Authority3. Anchor Text4. Social Sharing

Anchor Text Importance

Your Site Is Trusted!

Part 2

The Importance of RSS

Specific Content Consumption

Enter FeedBurner

http://www.feedburner.com/

Why Google Is Important

http://bit.ly/XnmTK9

Other Ways To Tell Google

https://www.google.com/webmasters/https://www.google.com/analytics

https://plus.google.com/

Twitter Updates

Always Share Your Content

SEO Ranking Factors

http://www.searchmetrics.com/en/searchmetrics/press/ranking-factors/

Make Your Content Easy To Share

The Psychology of Sharing

Other Content Types

SEO For Images

• Be sure to include an “alt” text• Use descriptive file names

• Use – president-bob-commencement.jpg• Not – DSC_0012.jpg

YouTube Is The 2nd Largest Search Engine

http://bit.ly/XnmTK9

Other Content Types

Internal Linking

Related Content

Related Content (After The Article)

Printer Friendly Pages & SEO

Don’t create “Duplicate Content”1. <meta name="Robots" content="NOINDEX"/> 2. < a rel="nofollow" href="site.com/printer-friendly-page.htm">3. <link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” media=”print” href=”printer.css” />4. <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://site.com/page” />5. User-agent: *

Disallow: /print/

PDFs & SEO

Comments & SEO

Pagination of Articles

Google Author Profiles

https://plus.google.com/authorship

Special Rules for Google News Inclusions

Article URLs1. Be unique2. Be permanent3. Display a three-digit number*

http://support.google.com/news/publisher/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=68323

Creating a Google News Sitemap• Be sure you are using “News-specific tags”

http://support.google.com/news/publisher/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=74288

Press Release & SEO

100+ Years

Personalization and Going Hyperlocal

http://slidesha.re/ZH3iq2

Unique Content for Every Student

http://readabout.me/

Stats

http://slidesha.re/ZH3iq2

97% of newspapers print hometown news from

colleges

90% of editors consider these stories to be important, must-

publish content

Inspiration & Ideas

Inspiration & Ideas

http://www.edustyle.net/tags.php?tag=news

PR on Websites Free Report

• 3rd Edition• 292 pages• 100+ PR Tips• 100+ Design

Recommendations

http://www.nngroup.com/reports/pr-websites/

Questions?

Kyle James@KyleJames

kyle@nucloud.com