In our first post we discussed why colleges and universities need to pay attention to Digital Marketing, now we will discuss some key initiatives for achieving success moving forward.
Before you start any digital marketing efforts, you need to ensure that the website is fundamentally sound. Moreover, that it’s easily crawlable by Search Engines, both from a technical and content perspective. A comprehensive website audit reveals the full landscape of your university’s website as it stands today.
Conducting a website audit will also reveal any issues impeding incoming traffic, Search engine visibility, and so much more. In almost every website audit performed at Stryde, we uncover at least a handful of issues that need to be addressed. For example, take a look at a crawl report for the University of Phoenix’s website.
Please note that University of Phoenix is not a client of Stryde, and this is only for illustrative analysis purposes only.
A comprehensive website audit consists of two parts:
- Technical SEO Audit
- Site Optimizations & Implementation
Both of these parts make up the core of Search Engine optimization (SEO). As Google has explained, “Search engine optimization is often about making small modifications to parts of your website. When viewed individually, these changes might seem like incremental improvements, but when combined with other optimizations, they could have a noticeable impact on your site’s user experience and performance in organic search results.”
Technical SEO Audit
The function of the Technical Seo Audit is just as you might expect: ensure that Search Engine Crawlers are able to access your webpages . In other words, the elements you analyze here aren’t visible to the casual website visitor. These elements occur behind the screen in the code and other crannies of the website to communicate with the search engines.
A typical technical SEO audit includes analysis of the following key components:
- General technical issues
- URL conventions
- Information architecture
- Page consolidation
General Technical Issues
There exists a plethora of technical aspects to websites, influencing what visitors see, how they get there, what search engines see, etc. Some most important areas to include in your own technical website audit are HTML markup issues, audit page load times, review canonicalization, server response codes, crawl errors, 404 handling, IP region and Whois location data.
URL Conventions
URLs are not all equal: some are good and some are bad. A ‘good’ URL structure will be logical, clear, lack parameters and be representative of the page’s purpose. When the URL structure is optimized to label page content and establish hierarchy, search engines and users understand the topic, relevance, and importance of every single page on your website. For example,
- Bad URL Structure: http://www.phoenix.edu/colleges_divisions/business.html (current URL on phoenix.edu)
- Good URL Structure: http://www.phoenix.edu/study/business
Information Architecture & Page Consolidation
After an appropriate URL structure is determined, you need to optimize the labeling and organization of your website’s content to conform to search engine guidelines, as well as improving the usability and contextual relevance for your website’s real human visitors. During this time, you’ll also want to review your website for superfluous pages. Consolidating your website’s page to include only what is relevant only positively serves the search engines and visitors to your website.
As you review the university’s website with information architecture in mind, it’s important to consider the algorithmic approach used by search engines to dissect, analyze, and categorize content.
Image Source – Nathaniel Davis
Pertinent signals used by search engines to categorize information include elements like title tags, internal links, and more. We’ll dig into these elements in the following section.
Site Optimizations
A technically sound website is only half of the complete audit process. Part two, the site optimization portion, allows search engine crawlers to associate unique keyword themes to each page on your website. By analyzing a handful of on-page factors, you can optimize each of your website’s pages to their fullest potential.
The on-page elements you should look at when carrying out site optimizations are title tags, meta descriptions, heading tags, image file names, image alt attributes, and contextual internal links.
Title Tags
Every page on your site has a title tag, which functions as a descriptive snippet viewable by search engine crawlers and search engine users. It’s what shows up in search results pages, and it’s typically the first thing any user from a search engine will read about your website.
The title tag (the text in blue) is succinct and includes keywords like online colleges, schools, and classes.
Best practices indicate that the title tag should be between 50 and 60 characters. As well as function as a concise, accurate preview of what’s on the page. The title tag should include the keyword theme of the page it represents.
Meta Descriptions
The meta description functions as a slightly more in-depth preview of the page’s content to both search engines and users of search engines. It lives below the title tag and the URL in the search results and gives users a concise synopsis of the content found within the page.
The meta description (the black text) falls within the character allotment, and includes relevant keywords.
For meta descriptions, best practices dictate a character count of between 140 and 150 characters. As with title tags, you should include the unique keyword theme in where applicable in the meta description.
Heading Tags
If you think of each unique URL of your website like a book, heading tags function as the chapter titles. H1, H2, and H3 tags describe the topics of your content to the search engines. Furthermore, they allow for ease of scanability by visitors.
Search engines don’t place a large amount of SEO value on heading tags. That being said, they’re still taken into consideration and provide value to human visitors to your website.
Image File Names & Alt Attributes
With all of the advanced and sometimes even artificial intelligence used by search engines, they still lack ocular capabilities. Since search engines can’t see, they use image file names and alt attributes to determine the content of visual images. Which means your image file names, and more importantly alt attributes, provide additional and critical context to search engine crawlers.
If the images on your site were uploaded with names like “IMG 3480” or something similar, you’ll at least want to give each image a descriptive alt attribute.
Contextual Internal Links
The pages of your website should support each other. One way to show this support is through contextual internal links. In the copy of your website pages, you should link (where appropriate) to other pages on your website. Not only does this show the search engines how the content of your pages work together, but it keeps the visitor clicking through pages of your website and consuming more of your content.
What’s Next?
After you’ve performed the complete website audit process, your university’s website will be foundationally sound and ready for domination of the digital marketing world! But first, you’ll need to set your goals and strategy. You’re in luck, because our next installment of Digital Marketing for Universities, we’re going to tackle goal setting and strategy.
Here’s a look ahead at all of the upcoming Digital Marketing for Universities content:
- Goal Setting & Strategy
- SEO Need-to-Knows
- Platform Identification
- Tapping Your Content Sources
We’ll see you soon for more! Until then, don’t hesitate to drop us a line or a comment with any challenges you’re encountering with digital marketing for universities.
The post Digital Marketing for Universities: Website Audit appeared first on STRYDE.
