Search Engine Marketing: Making your web pages work harder to attract new students

By Susan O’Neil

[Note: Susan O’Neil is the founder and C.E.O. of @Web Site Publicity, a leading search engine marketing firm and an mStoner strategic partner. She is the co-author of Maximize Web Site Traffic.]

Enrollment professionals live by the numbers. But here are some numbers that may surprise you—just a very few examples of how many people search for these college-related terms each day:

689 search for “texas college”
43 search for “womens college”
12 look for “top undergraduate engineering schools”
11 search for “womens college soccer”

Your college or university may offer what these people are looking for, but will they be able to find you in the search engines that they use?” Search Engine Marketing allows you to introduce your institution to people who have either not heard of it or have not considered it for some reason.

Search Engine Optimization
There are two types of search engine marketing—search engine optimization and paid search advertising.

Search engine optimization focuses on ensuring that your web pages surface at or near the top of the search results for your key programs. One way to determine your institution’s “findability” online is to search for terms that you feel may be important to your enrollment success. If you can’t find your website in the first page of Google returns, then neither can prospective students who are searching for programs or majors or institutional characteristics rather than by name.

To increase your search engine ranking, you need to optimize your site. This begins by changing the coding and content structure for your existing website so that the site becomes more search engine-friendly and therefore emerges higher in a search.

One example of making a site search engine-friendly is to make certain that each page of your site has a unique title tag and description in the source code. How can you find out if this is happening now? Go to your website and click on a number of links; at the very top of your screen, in the blue horizontal bar, the title tag for each web page will be displayed. If the titles are the same on most pages, you are missing opportunity for being found in the search engines. So, creating unique title tags throughout your site is one step among many in the search engine optimization process.

Paid Search
The second type of search engine marketing is called paid search, or pay-per-click advertising. This does not require changes to your website to get high rankings; instead you buy high rankings by advertising on sites like Google, Yahoo and MSN. Once again, it’s important to know the search terms that are critical to the success of your website—then you bid against competitors for top rankings for those search terms.

Pay-per-click advertising can be highly successful when managed well. To learn more, investigate the free tools offered by Yahoo. With these tools, you can find out how many people are searching for terms that may be related to your institution and you can determine what your competitors are willing to pay for those visitors.

Which method of search engine marketing is better for your website? In today’s hyper-competitive online marketplace, most colleges and universities will require both in order to give their enrollment program the support it will require to be successful. Some outsource all or part of this online support; others, after initial training, bring the functions in-house.

Whichever way your institution chooses to get the most out of the Web, remember that “content is king.” The more you can tell your Web visitors about your institution, your courses, your people, and everything else that makes your institution unique, the more “findable” your site can become to the students in your future.