I’ve seen a lot of crazy things that institutions are doing in regard to search engine optimization (and no, I won’t name names).

In honor of Search Engine Optimization month at Converge, here are some tips to avoid these common pitfalls.

1.    Splintered root domains and sub domains

I get it. I really do. Governing a higher education website can be like trying to run a small city. Sometimes the easiest thing to do is to create a new subdomain or domain and let the Business School or the Alumni office go-to-town. For many purposes, that is just fine. However, when it comes to search engine optimization, you’re splintering your site’s ranking power!

This is especially true of blogs, news and events. Be sure to create fresh, regular content in a subdirectory folder of your main root domain, not on a subdomain or unique root domain. 

2.    Duplicate content

Duplicate content is when two or more pages on your website have over approximately 90% the same content. Search engines hate this because they can’t differentiate between the two, get confused and often won’t rank any of the duplicate pages.

In Higher Education, we often see this happen by mistake. Sometimes it is a technical issue at the server level creating the same page on two separate subdomains.

For example, if the following two URLs render the exact same page without a redirect, you might have a duplicate content issue.

–       http://www.mywebsite.edu

–       http://mywebsite.edu

Duplicate content can pop up in a lot of different circumstances. We use Moz Analytics to crawl websites to check for these (and many other) errors.

3.    Ignoring Title and Meta Description

Think of your title and meta description as ad copy. These are two critical pieces that show up in the search engine results page (SERP) for each page of your website.

Luckily, most content management systems (CMSs) will let you easily edit and even automate these pieces so they’re always accurate and relevant.

4.    Poorly formatted blog, event and news feeds

One of the most consistent, fresh, topical sources of content on your site is your blog, news and event feeds. This content gives you more opportunities to pick up links, clicks and followers. They are very social media friendly and give users a reason to come back over and over again to your site. Search engines love all of these things!

The problem is, sometimes these pieces require custom or third party applications and therefore can be hard to properly integrate. I’ve seen many schools creating duplicate content errors with every publish.  Unreadable URLs, nonsensical page titles and meta descriptions, and fractured domain ranking power are all common.

Even worse, the first instinct of many schools when we uncover these things is to “just exclude those pages from search so we don’t have errors.” But search engines love these pages. It’s like inviting them to dinner but refusing to serve dessert!

Read over The “Perfectly Optimized” Page infographic by Rand Fishkin and Moz to see if your news and events pages are coming up short.

5.    Forgetting about faculty, students and staff

One of the great things about working in higher education is there is always something amazing going on. From the sorority raising money for the local fire department to research projects changing the lives of children across the globe, we are up to our elbows in wonderful stories waiting to be told. You’ve heard the expression “content is king”? Well that is true in SEO as well.

Many schools scale up their content efforts by enlisting faculty, students and staff to participate in content creation and development through blogs, videos, podcasts and interviews. Every story that is told is an opportunity to get links, likes, engagement and to improve the page’s rank, which in turn helps your overall domain authority.

Search engine optimization isn’t easy, and quite frankly, you wouldn’t want it to be. It’s a competition and with the right strategies your institution has the chance to get ahead. Be sure to join us for our upcoming webinar, You’re Doing It Wrong: What’s New in SEO for Higher Education, for even more.