Writing For Web | .eduGuru

3 Things Higher Ed Can Learn from the iPad (for Better or Worse)

1. February 2010

I’ve been thinking about this one ever since the big announcement came. Rather than give Apple the halo effect or the horn effect and hold it up as the model of what to do or what not to do, I thought these few lessons were a bit of both:

Best practices for training content contributors

26. January 2010

4 Comments

The driving force of any web site is the content contributors, the people who know every detail of their department and hold the key to student success. These are the people you want publishing web content. What they have is value, the closer you can get them to the content creation process the better.

Page Titles and Meta Descriptions: Your Search Calls to Action

13. July 2009

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Page Titles and Meta Descriptions: Your Search Calls to Action

I know that I’ve recently covered On-Page SEO, but I’m bringing back two of the specific elements. In my job at HubSpot one of the things that I teach people is how to optimize their site for search engines. (Just to be clear, no I’m not an SEO consultant because that is only one small [...]

Need a Link Building Strategy? Create Content!

17. June 2009

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Need a Link Building Strategy? Create Content!

So a few weeks ago we talked about Off-Page Optimization where the whole strategy there is to get inbound links and to do a good job of internal linking. So after you have mastered internal linking it’s time to get those external links. This can be extremely challenging and if you go about it the [...]

Content is More Important than Design

27. May 2009

23 Comments

Now I know that some web designers out there can’t wait to get to the comment section to “rip me a new one,” but please humor me and read through my reasoning here. I hope you will see this is a well thought out and valid argument worth your time. Then after reading you are [...]

Understanding SEO: Off-Page

13. May 2009

20 Comments

Last week we looked at On-Page SEO so hopefully this week you are ready to understand the basics on the other side of the equation. Once again I’m not going to get into all the advanced functionality because I think if you can understand 80% of what you need to know, and quite frankly that [...]

Understanding SEO: On-Page

6. May 2009

100 Comments

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not pixie dust or snake oil. It’s a group of fundamental things that when done to a website it makes your site more accessible and usable. The thing that I tell people all the time is “A search bot is your dumbest blindest user. If you aren’t creating your site [...]

Writing content to the lowest common denominator??

18. November 2008

3 Comments

The following is a guest post by George Sackett, Content Supervisor in the Community Relations office of St. Louis Community College a four-campus college with 26,000 students. St. Louis Community College recently undertook a complete rewrite and redesign of their Web site to reinforce their “one college” philosophy. George’s prior experience includes Director of Communications [...]