Writings on web design and higher education from Missoula, MT

There are two major things that prospective students are searching for during their college search: a college and money to pay for it. Every college and university out there knows they have to focus their content on prospective students searching for college admission, specific programs and degrees, and the campus life opportunities that come with life at a college or university; this is the status quo of higher ed websites, and it works well. If an institution wants to stand out in the search results for prospective students’ web inquiries, then they have to think creatively and outside of the standard box.

Most institutions offer scholarships, grants and loans; each of which are thoroughly advertised on their websites in the admissions/prospective students’ pages. This is a good start, getting the content out there in the first place, but taking it the next step can potentially deliver a huge boost in new student inquiries.

Drive students to your scholarship pages through links in targeted academic content. Let students know while they are browsing the College of Education that there is a scholarship available through a link in the sidebar. This will help funnel traffic to your scholarship page and increase your conversion rate as well as passing the PageRank from your academic site to your admissions site and vice-versa, all while building a more definitive keyword presence for your site (a good link for our example page may read “Scholarship for teacher education majors.”) This method takes little to no resources or time, and can be a quick addition to any institutional website.

If you have the resources to go the extra mile, I suggest building additional content in your admissions site about opportunities for scholarship and other methods to pay for college. Prospective students are searching for this content, and right now the private sector is the main cafeteria for what they crave. Even a mid-sized college could challenge giants like FastWeb.com in the search results if they offered keyword rich content that uniquely addressed scholarship programs for each major, ethnic group and income level that the school provides for. Your students will thank you for the resources, and this increase in quality targeted content will bolster web traffic for years to come. Your school probably has all the content written already in the form of flyers, posters and guides placed on the Student Services and Financial Aid department walls.

An SEO company whose services I have used in the past just underwent a redesign of their site architecture. Now powered entirely by the blogging software Wordpress, Netconcepts has turned their entire corporate website into a blog.

As Stephan Spencer, CEO of Netconcepts, said in his blog, I don’t think anyone has ever done this before for a major corporate site. Personally, I think it is mostly a PR stunt, with many of the advantages they claim being easily obtainable on several mainstream CMS platforms.

Stephan claims that now he can get exposure to more search engines because his site is a blog. Poppycock! Any good quality CMS out there (like what I use, Modx CMS) can output an RSS feed for recent content, sections, or whatever you like; this enables any website to be placed in blog search engines, which should be more aptly named RSS search engines (the non-blog portion of my site is in Technorati, for instance.)

Furthermore, I think Netconcepts is going a bit overboard here about marketing their site to any and every search engine. I would challenge them to produce two clients a year from these blog search engines… I just don’t think that’s where people that need to hire consultants do their looking. Even if they did, the most popular blog search engine, Technorati, is date focused, so their website exposure has already faded from the charts (a search for SEO yields nothing of them, and even a search for the tag Netconcepts produces only one result, in Stephan’s personal blog nonetheless!)

But their move to Wordpress is no joke either; it has some real benefits that many companies should consider:

• Tagging allows them to increase the breadth of their site without writing more content, allowing for more placings in the search engines. They call this the Long Tail of search.
• Being in the RSS search engines puts them in the face of the blogosphere, where bloggers may pick up on some new articles and discuss them.
• If they are smart, they will try to leverage the wordpress forum and become a featured corporate site. The traffic generated from such an announcement would be prime, not only involume, but also in quality (each of the Wordpress users a potential client and new inbound link).

If I was a fly on the Netconcepts wall this week, I would love to pick up on whether they are feeling restricted in their site architecture now that they don’t have a more flexible CMS (I know that is why I moved away from Wordpress as a CMS) and if the traffic they generate from RSS search engines actually lead to sales. If their conversion rate remains high, I am sure we can expect a report out on their site within a few months that will probably be syndicated across the SEO landscape.

What do you think of this new turnaround in CMS structure? Can it provide results?