seo – Lane Community College Web Team

Welcome back!

I know, I know, we’re in week 4, and I’m finally putting out my first post of the year. But it’s 2020. It’s that kind of year.

Last week the web team attended the 2020 HighEdWeb annual conference. This is one of my favorite conferences, and it was even better this year because it was absolutely free online (though in central time, which made for some early mornings). Here’s some gems:

Plain Language Matters.

It’s an accessibility issue. It’s an equity issue. People skim online. If we make that hard for them, they leave. Take a look at our previous plain language post.

Resource pages & emails don’t work.

One of the groups at Miami University did a lot of extensive testing. People don’t self serve. If you have a lot of links and resources that you want to put out there, consider a drip campaign to slowly provide those links at a pace people can digest. Use social to highlight different resources at different times. Include titles that highlight the problem the resource solves (“Looking for a tutor late on a Sunday night before class? Look no further!”). Track what you do to see what works (and reach out if you’d like help setting that up!). Rather than a resource page, consider a blog, where those resource links can be provided in context, and do some content marketing for you. We’ve also covered resource pages in the past.

Stop posting flyers and event posters online.

Especially now, when we’re not going to see them in person. Flyers and posters are designed for print, and don’t translate well to digital. If you’re considering putting a flyer or poster online or on a digital sign, reach out – we’ll connect you with some graphic design resources, and help design for the medium you’ll be promoting on.

The college website is for prospective students. And those students know when they’re being marketed to.

Carlton did a great session where they detailed extensive user testing before their homepage redesign. They found things like:

prospective students (particularly Gen Z) think the entire website is for them. Even the section clearly labeled “Alumni”. But your homepage should be for them before any other audience: most other audiences search for something, then land on some other page. Prospective students are the most likely, by far, to land on the homepage.
they know when pictures are staged. They want to see people in place: shots that show what students actually do some place on your campus, and how that sets you apart. Person under a tree reading a book? Clearly staged. Dining hall shot? Every college has a dining hall. Candid shot of a class outside? Student learning to machine something? Much better.
Carousels don’t work. I think one possible exception is a photo gallery, but that’s tricky.
The large hero image on a program’s website sets the tone and creates a greater impression than all the text there.
From one of their slides: “Students want #nofilter, but we’re giving them #fellowkids”

FAQs don’t work.

While we may think splitting our content up into questions is easier for the student, it actually makes things harder to understand. Read your entire FAQ page, make groups out of the content and write a header for each one, and then rewrite the content in each group to paragraph form. It’ll work better for everyone. Here’s a page with the slides, a sample FAQ with real life before and after examples, and some other resources for why we should stop using FAQ pages. You can also review our previous post on FAQs.

The structure of a backlink request

We’ve talked about why we get backlink requests, but what do they look like? So glad you asked. Let’s talk about my dog.

Five years ago I tried to take my dog hammock camping. She got cold overnight, and I had to put her in the car to get warm. When I wrote up the trip on my personal website, I linked to a dog sleeping bag manufacturer, since I naïvely thought my dog would sleep in one and keep warm (spoiler alert: she will not).

Picture of my adorable dog — Dog tax. Picture from the trip. She was even wearing a jacket!

A couple weeks ago, I got a backlink request from a website that wrote up a guide to buying a dog sleeping bag. This request fit the form of a standard backlink request template so well that I based a fill in the blank backlink generator request on it:

Having trouble? View this embedded page on its own.

This isn’t the exact email I got, but it’s close enough to get an idea of the structure of a request. They try to include a little information about you, which they can look up online (like your job title). They include something vaguely complimentary (like calling your post “amazing”). Then they explain how their site would fit perfectly in with your content before wishing you well.

I think the process goes like this. Someone writes a vague template, based on a script available on some SEO website. Then they search for some term like “College scholarships” or “Student Resources”, and go through the top 50 or 100 pages, emailing the site owner with an email customized just enough that it won’t feel generic, unless you get a lot of backlink requests.

So how do you respond?

Consider not responding at all. There are ways to automate gathering contact information (using a WHOIS record or various screen scraping techniques), so it’s entirely possible that your request was sent by a script, instead of a person. Don’t feel bad about ignoring a computer.

Definitely don’t click on the link they sent you. If someone sends you an unsolicited link, never ever ever* click on it. If you’re really curious, at least Google the url first. See what you can learn about the page. Don’t just trust the text of a url – there’s ways to spoof that too.

You can also just forward those requests to us. Believe me, we get a lot of them. Our general rule is to not respond to backlink requests for commercial websites, and to avoid including links to commercial websites in our pages. We sometimes make exceptions for local, non-profit organizations. But since those organizations are part of our community and usually know someone at Lane, they tend not to reach out using a form email.

Remember, linking to a website from your page can provide an implicit endorsement of that page. Make sure you trust what you’re linking to.

* ever ever ever ever ever ever.

Backlink Requests

Back in the resource pages post, I briefly mentioned backlink requests. Since if you don’t get these regularly they can be difficult to identify and understand, I thought we could dig into them. Backlink requests aren’t evil, and getting backlinks can certainly help your Search Engine Optimization (SEO). But the people making the requests don’t necessarily have the interests of our students in mind, so you should know how to spot requests and why they’re sent.

A quick refresher. Search engines mostly work by looking at how pages link to each other. Pages that get linked to a lot (that have a lot of inbound links) are considered more authoritative. Links from those pages are worth more than links from sites with fewer inbound links. If you have a website that you’re trying to get to rank higher in search, getting other sites to link back to yours will help.

One way to make that happen is to ask. You can do that many different ways. For instance, you could find a website with a broken or outdated link, and suggest to the website owner that they link to your site instead. Or there’s the testimonial strategy, where you write a testimonial and offer it for free to another website, with an expectation they’ll attribute your testimonial to your site. Offering a guest blog post is another. The most straightforward is to ask directly. And the easiest place to ask for your link to be included? A resource page.

College websites are particularly attractive targets. While as mentioned above, Google certainly provides a lot of search engine weight to links, there are all sorts of other factors they consider. One of those is domain name. Not every domain is easy to get. Anyone can purchase a .com, a .org, or dozens of others. But some, like .mil, .gov, and .edu are very hard to get. If you want an .edu domain, you need to be an accredited post-secondary educational institution. And you can only have one.

Because an external agency has guaranteed the validity of the domain, Google is thought to give .edu sites a little boost over sites with more open domains (part of why you probably don’t want a .com for your department!).

When someone sends you an email, requesting you put their link on your site, ask yourself if they stand to gain financially from an increase in traffic on their website. The link they’re sending you might not sell anything directly. But that page might link to something that does or to a page with advertising – linking to a page on a site provides a boost to that page’s rank, which in turn provides a smaller boost to all the pages that page links to.

We should also remember that linking to a site provides something of an endorsement of that site. Particularly on resource pages we’re effectively promising students that we’ve validated these resources as good and trustworthy. Make sure they are.

Next post we’ll look at the structure of a backlink request and how to respond.

Goal Check-in #4

This is our fourth of five check-ins on progress for our web team goals.

1. Reduce the total number of pages on the Lane website by 5% (from 5550 to 5273)

Regretfully, this number has slid up since last check-in, from 4948 to 5003. There’s a couple of things behind this: there’s been an unusually high number of news releases, we’ve added pages to support our new slideshows, and we just had a training. There’s still 18 open tasks on our tracker about eliminating pages, so there’s still hope we’ll improve further by our final check-in. But our primary lesson is that we need to improve how we count our public pages – training pages, which no one can see, aren’t really hurting anyone, and we should really stop tracking our progress on them.

2. Reduce the number of pages with more than 15,000 characters by 10% (from 249 to 224)

Somehow, this measure also increased slightly, from 136 pages to 141 pages. Usually, these pages are minutes from meetings. Lesson learned: we need an intranet.

3. Reduce the average character count of our pages by 10% (from 4650 to 4185)

Sadly, this measure has also increased a bit, from 3966 to 4058. As mentioned last goal, this goal is no longer really one of our goals, as we’re deliberately using some longer form content.

4. Improve the average age of our pages (the average late updated date) by 4 months (from 16 months to 12 months)

We’ve stayed steady on this goal since last post, staying at 17 months old. This is one of our most difficult tasks: please help us out! If you look at the listing of pages in your site from the right sidebar on the dashboard, under “Sites I’m responsible for”, you can sort that by updated date. Take a look at some of your older pages; you might be surprised by how out of date they can be.

Traffic Goals

We also had two traffic goals:

Increase session counts for www.lanecc.edu during the period 6/14/17-6/14/18 compared to the previous year by 5%, from 3,228,904 to 3,390,349
Decrease the bounce rate for www.lanecc.edu during the period 6/14/17-6/14/18 compared to the previous year by 5%, from 37.05% to 35.19%

Since these are annual goals, they’re a little harder to compare against. But we can compare similar time periods. For the first eight months, 6/14-2/14, comparing 2016/17 to 2017/18, our session counts have decreased by 11.13%, and our bounce rate has shrunk by 0.01%. This is a bit of an improvement on our bounce rate, but our session counts remain crushing. A glimmer of hope: new sessions are up 7.76%, and average session duration is up 7.98%.

We’re still seeing positive returns from some of the pages we’ve redeveloped. If you work on the website of an academic program, and you’d like to dramatically update your pages, please send us an email. We’ll get in touch about how you can get in the queue for content rewrites. We’re hoping to launch our next redesigned program very soon.

Goal Check-in #3

This is our third of five check-ins on progress for our web team goals. It’s been a busy few months, as we’ve made substantial progress on some of our goals.

1. Reduce the total number of pages on the Lane website by 5% (from 5550 to 5273)

We’ve improved even further since last check-in, when we were at 5072. We currently have 4948 pages, which is a record low for us. There’s another 22 pages we’re actively working on eliminating right now, so I’m hopeful we’ll get under 4900 before the end of the academic year. Don’t be surprised if we come calling to talk about some of your older pages soon!

2. Reduce the number of pages with more than 15,000 characters by 10% (from 249 to 224)

We flew right past this goal, getting down to just 136 pages with more than 15,000 characters. Most of that was because we realized old Board minutes could be moved to one of our archive servers, allowing us to remove some of our longest and oldest pages. this way the Board minutes are still publicly accessible, but we don’t need to worry about constantly updating them.

3. Reduce the average character count of our pages by 10% (from 4650 to 4185)

Eliminating the old Board minutes also helped us meet this goal. The average page on our site is now only 3966 characters long. I think we’ll want to stick right around that length – many of our newer pages will be deliberately long (see the new template content later in this post!)

4. Improve the average age of our pages (the average late updated date) by 4 months (from 16 months to 12 months)

This one’s the hardest for us, and we’ve actually slipped backwards. The average page is now 17 months old. While we’ll certainly keep working on updates, please help us out! If you look at the listing of pages in your site from the right sidebar on the dashboard, under “Sites I’m responsible for”, you can sort that by updated date. Take a look at some of your older pages; you might be surprised by how out of date they can be.

Traffic Goals

We also had two traffic goals:

Increase session counts for www.lanecc.edu during the period 6/14/17-6/14/18 compared to the previous year by 5%, from 3,228,904 to 3,390,349
Decrease the bounce rate for www.lanecc.edu during the period 6/14/17-6/14/18 compared to the previous year by 5%, from 37.05% to 35.19%

Since these are annual goals, they’re a little harder to compare against. But we can compare similar time periods. For the first six months, 6/14-12/14, comparing 2016 to 2017, our session counts have decreased by 7.47%, and our bounce rate has increased by 1.28%. This is a bit of an improvement over last check-in on bounce rates, but a crushing disappointment on session counts.

We’re starting to deploy our revised program pages, starting with the Business Department. SEO is a marathon, and it’ll likely take months before the impact of our work is fully felt, we’re already starting to see some changes. Since November 21st, when we launched our first new program page, we’ve seen some big changes in our statistics, compared to the same period the previous year:

Program Landing Page	Unique Page views	Entrances	Average Time on Page
Accounting	21%	187%	218%
Administrative Office Professional	13%	17%	249%
Business Assistant	7%	-75%	24%

I can only guess about the decrease in entrances for Business Assistant, but it might be related to the quality of content on the other program pages. For example, check out what accounting looked like before the redesign. The improved content quality might be capturing people who were actually interested in a degree, and hadn’t realized from a Google search that Business Assistant is a certificate.

We’re not quite ready to release the new program page to the rest of the programs at the college, but we’re getting close. We’ve already started work on CIT, Culinary, and the Arts. As we iron out the last issues with the template (there’s still some pieces missing, even from the pages we’ve already launched!), we’ll be in touch with the other academic departments to start moving to the new program layout.

In the mean time, please help us out! Think about the keywords your page targets, and make sure your content contains those words. And whenever possible, please make sure your page includes some sort of target or goal you’re trying to get your visitors to do. If you’d like help researching keywords, or would like to learn how you rank on Google for various keywords, just ask! We’re happy to show you a couple of reports that we think could help you with your content a lot.

Goal Check-in #2

This is our second of five check-ins on if we’re making progress on our web team goals.

1. Reduce the total number of pages on the Lane website by 5% (from 5550 to 5273)

Still met, but up a little from last check-in. We’re now at 5072.

2. Reduce the number of pages with more than 15,000 characters by 10% (from 249 to 224)

Unfortunately, this is unchanged, and we’re still at 232. This is a very hard goal to meet, as many of these pages are either preserved for archival purposes or simply contain a lot of content.

3. Reduce the average character count of our pages by 10% (from 4650 to 4185)

We crept up a little bit, from 4412 to 4466.

4. Improve the average age of our pages (the average late updated date) by 4 months (from 16 months to 12 months)

Unfortunately, still no progress on this goal. The only plus side is that our pages haven’t gotten any older. Please help us out by editing your pages!

Traffic Goals

We also had two traffic goals:

Increase session counts for www.lanecc.edu during the period 6/14/17-6/14/18 compared to the previous year by 5%, from 3,228,904 to 3,390,349
Decrease the bounce rate for www.lanecc.edu during the period 6/14/17-6/14/18 compared to the previous year by 5%, from 37.05% to 35.19%

Since these are annual goals, they’re a little harder to compare against. But we can compare similar time periods. For the first four months, 6/14-10/14, comparing 2016 to 2017, our session counts have decreased by 3.66%, and our bounce rate has increased by 3%. Last check-in I was optimistic, as our session counts had increased a little, but that appears to have been confined to summer.

That graph shows the story. Our numbers were pretty close until Fall, when our session traffic fell as students returned. Previously, we’ve observed that school year traffic changes closely follow enrollment trends, and this year was no exception.

We’ve taken a more proactive stance with these two goals, since they’re critical for the overall health of the college. We’ve been collaborating with the Business Department to work with Lunar Logic to improve our content and structure for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). While we’re not seeing results yet, SEO is a marathon, and it’ll likely take months before the impact of our work is fully felt.

But we need your help with this goal as well! Think about the keywords your page targets, and make sure your content contains those words. And whenever possible, please make sure your page includes some sort of target or goal you’re trying to get your visitors to do. If you’d like help researching keywords, or would like to learn how you rank on Google for various keywords, just ask! We’re happy to show you a couple of reports that we think could help you with your content a lot.