In my years that I’ve now spent in higher education, one universal truth I have found is that nothing quite moves a project along like when someone much more important and much less web savvy than you deems an issue worth addressing.  Such was the case only a couple months after I had started at the university, when the Director of Marketing noticed that new information she had put up on the site wasn’t coming up in search results, and the results that were hitting weren’t particularly relevant to the topic in the first place.  Thus, a mission was born, to find a way to make our search better, and to do it NOW.  That’s the other thing about people higher up than you, when they say jump, generally you jump.

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Over on FJ’s Higher Education Photography for Recruitment Blog he just made an excellent post about Missed Opportunity for Higher Ed.  I wasn’t even half way through his short but valuable post before light bulbs started going off in my head.  (Hey FJ thanks for the mention and hopefully this post will help fulfill some of this indepth SEO you claim I have)  Picture to the right was take from FJ’s blog and if your college is interested in Higher Education Photography Wofford hasn’t used FJ, but I’ve heard nothing but great things from lots of credible sources.

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I’ve been kind of neglecting the SEO part of this blog, so lets get started. The most important page on your college site is your Institutional homepage. For Wofford roughly one third of all pageviews are this page. Because of this importance it is vital that this page is not just optimized for a human visitor, but also for the search engines to bring traffic to your site. Search engines bring tens of thousands (average month is upper 40,000 hits for example) of visits to Wofford’s site a month. Read the rest of this entry »

Boy did Andrew not have any idea what he was invoking the other day when he posted about the Ad Age 150. In what turned out to be an interesting Monday and I read about multiple bloggers who rejected this idea to spend two minutes to submit their blog to a Marketing Ranking service. What’s so ironic is the debate has taken exponentially longer than the amount of time it takes to submit, you have to love a good debate! If you don’t want to do it no problem that’s your decision, but something has been eating at me and as I laid down in bed last night one of those few barely twitching electrons is my head hit a spark that can only be described as a nuclear reaction. Anyone who’s considering starting a blog be warned because those nights where you used to sleep peacefully will now be consumed with an unending river of blog post ideas and occasionally the dam will burst and a tidal wave will crash down impeding sleep until you have the flick of a thought on paper. Here goes.

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A while back I read a post over on SEOmoz about popular web browser toolbars and their value from a web developer or internet marketer perspective. It was a wonderful article that I highly recommend. This article had me thinking, this list is great but what about Higher Education professionals? I’ve been working on a list and actually had a conversation with Chris Strauber our Web Service Librarian about it. Somewhere deep down I guess I kind of feel like a web person putting together a list of Firefox add-ons that you use is sort of a requirement, right!? For the most part many of these are the standards that everyone has installed, but hopefully you will see something that that you just didn’t know about. So here is my list.

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Website Grader is one of those excellent free resources that I run on sites about once a month. In it its own words: Read the rest of this entry »

If you haven’t read part one about how to setup a WordPress blog then I highly recommend reading it. This post will cover customizing your WordPress blog using themes and plug-ins. 

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So as I mentioned in my first post starting a blog and doing a better job of professional development is one of my New Year’s resolutions.  This has been quite an adventure getting the blog to the point that it is now.  Hours of research, installation, and decision making later I think the blog is close to being in a shape that I’m satisfied.  I’ve been creating and monitoring blogs for the college for the last year and a half so I’ve fairly familiar with blogs and how they work.  I guess it was in launching all the blogs this fall that I really got into SEO, RSS, and all the other ways to truly make your blog stand out from the rest.  So needless to say I’m not a rookie at this blog thing just a rookie at creating a personal one.  Although this is the first time I’ve tried to setup a blog using WordPress I feel like I have learned enough through this process to put together a thorough explanation about the choices I’ve made and why it’s the correct way to setup a blog.  If you disagree with something or have any questions I’d love to hear them!  Seriously… I would. Read the rest of this entry »