5 Key Google Strategies

Ranking in the New Google Order - A Checklist for Schools

Recently, a major change to Google algorithms, known as the “Panda Update,” caused a reshuffling of 12 percent of all search rankings. This update is the largest that Google has conducted to date, and it resulted in significant ranking changes for many websites, including those in education. The good news is that websites with high quality content generally benefitted from the update. Here at CUnet, we saw positive repercussions for our own sites as well as those of our clients.

Keeping up with Google’s ongoing updates and new features is a significant challenge, even for those of us that focus exclusively on SEO for a living.  Over the past few months, in addition to the Panda update, we’ve seen changes to personalized search as well as Google Places, and  more recently, the launch of the Google “+1” button—all of which are impacting search results and making it increasingly difficult to measure the return on SEO efforts. Despite this, it’s important for schools to remain vigilant in their efforts, since search rankings can be the single most powerful tool to increase self-generated, direct inquiries.

In an effort to help you understand and navigate the new “Google Order”, we’ve created a brief checklist with some tips and guidelines that may help to maintain and improve the search rankings for your school’s site.

1. Target your prospects and students, not the search engine—All the changes in Google have been driven by one goal—improving the user experience and helping searchers to find high quality content.  As long as you have the same goal (to provide well-thought out, original content), you are unlikely to be negatively impacted by future updates. The best way to do this is to focus on offering what students and prospects want to see, not what you think the search engine is looking for.  It’s also worth considering the tools your prospects are using to access information online, including Facebook and Twitter. Take advantage of these social media tools to promote your content.

2. Delay RSS distribution of new content—One of the issues that many reputable websites have faced recently is the republishing of their content on other websites. Even worse, in some cases, the “republishing” site is getting crawled and ranked by Google before the original author site, and appears higher in the rankings as a result. To help prevent this, we recommend holding off on pushing original content through your RSS feed for at least 48 hours to allow Google time to fully index your content before the “copycats” get their hands on it.

3. 400 is the new 250—Prior to the most recent Google update, a lot of emphasis was placed on having at least 250 words per content piece, but following the update the new standard is at least 400 words.  Be aware though – this doesn’t mean increasing the word count of an article at any expense. Large amounts of weak or unoriginal content will no longer get you the conversion rate desired, so any increase in article length should not be at the expense of quality. A well-written, original article at 250 words is still likely to rank higher than a 400-word article without substance.  Additionally, it’s worth noting that duplicate content (identical content appearing in more than one place on your site) can hurt search rankings.

4. Know your backlinks and choose your friends wisely—It’s a well-known fact that backlinks (inbound links from other sites pointing to your site) have a significant impact on SEO rankings, largely because they are considered an indicator of how popular your site is.  However, this is another case where “more is not always better”. In fact, having numerous backlinks from low-quality sites may actually hurt your rankings. If this is a big problem for your site, it may even be worth requesting that those sites remove links to your site.  In future, when distributing articles and cultivating backlinks, it’s important to be selective and find credible sites like PR Newswire.

5. Track, measure, and adjust—To have a successful SEO campaign you want to make sure you are clearly tracking your efforts and see the impact that changes may have.  SEO is not always intuitive, and it requires constant monitoring and attention. For example, while targeting high profile keywords may seem like an obvious approach, it may not be the most cost effective way to improve traffic to your site.  Focusing on building the authority of lower-profile keywords can ultimately drive more traffic and make it easier to secure those high-profile keywords in the long run. So choose your keywords wisely!

Between increased competition and the ongoing changes in the search world, it’s more difficult than ever before to stay on top of your search engine results. Despite this, they can be the single most important tool you have to increase the number of self-generated, direct inquiries your school receives.  If you are looking for advice or assistance to improve your search engine optimization, CUnet’s experts can help. Contact us for more information.