SEO - Wikipedia is the way to go

I have added my feature writing and documentary making course to the subdomain: Feature writing course. Unlike my other teaching notes I have embedded a feature writing blog so that students can make comments and add examples. I have then carefully linked from Wikipedia to elements of the course. This will create traffic for the subdomain, though it creates no additional page rank unfortunately. What I am learning from the sub domain experiment is that Wikipedia will send about 100 times more traffic to the site than the university front page (that's no criticism of the university front page) and about 10 times as much than even google.

Our google SERP position is still not great. We have moved up from not being on the top 50 pages, to being on page two for "MA Journalism" (see" Page Result here. We have are oscillating between the top of page 2 and the bottom of page one for the less cpmpetitive BA Journalism term. We are dominant in Yahoo and Bing! - where Page Rank is apparently far laess of a factor.

The real discovery is the importance of Wikipedia.

I think we can quickly increase traffic by 10x or 100x by getting lecturers to add their teaching materials (or make new ones - eg video) and then linking to those from Wikipedia.

That is by far the easiest, cheapest and above all quickest way to increase traffic. Building google Page Rank is slower than I anticipated.

AND NOW A MOAN...


The university front page has only PR 6 for its front page (very low for a university). The attention at the moment seems to be going into the relative side issue of redesigning the university site - its look and functionality.

I have failed I think to get it across that the university's own web site is in fact only a tiny proportion of its total presence on the web - which consists of things like what is said about us in The Student Room, on blogs, on comparison sites and our presence on Wikipedia or You Tube or Flicker. In journalism the experiment has really demonstrated how the university central website is only a small proportion of that view of us on the web (even when people are searching Winchester University). When people are searching for subjects (well for journalism anyway).

We do need to add page rank and rank high rank page to the sub-domain to get to the top of google SERPS. My experience at Westminster was that having SERP=1 in google makes a dramatic difference in both traffic and applications.

It is depressing that we can't seem to send a text link from the PR 6 front page of the university site to the sub-domain - just for experimental purposes if nothing else. Other unis do it - such as Falmouth (a direct competitor). Fighting these people you have the sense of having your hands tied behind your back, because they have optimised their front page to PR8 and then share that down with courses they are trying to promote.

On the redesign the main functionality issue I think is to move away from dynamic templates, because at the moment the CMS uses 'dynamic' templates which are efficient for internal pages on an intranet; but can be discriminated against by search engines (especially Google) because the search engines can sometimes thing they are duplicate pages. This I think may account for why out of 200 pages google is only spidering about 120 pages on the sub-domain; because they are all on dynamic templates and google might think they are duplicates.

On the look of the site, that is not so important. It looks clean and professional at the moment, so given the many things that need attention (eg comprehensive DMOZ listing for faculties and courses) I would say that is less important than many. We do need to add video on the front page. We have to avoid an ego trip over having a snazzy front page, but which has no traffic to speak of. Many high ranking and high traffic pages have very simple design- Content is King (and functionality).

Given all this the main thing the front page does for it accumulate Page Rank (not traffic). A text link from the front page to the sub-domain would lift the sub-domain's page rank (finding out empirically how much would in itself be a useful thing to do). The sub-domain has low page rank (two pages with PR2 and one page with PR1). A link from our only PR6 page would lift that I think (we could monitor the results).

Lastly on conversion we are getting enquiries now from the MA from abroad at about the rate of one a month - one from Russia, one from India. That's not bad given we have only SERP google page 2 and we are not listed in any comparison sites or on things like British Council lists of courses (due I suppose to the lack of a DMOZ listing, or a lack of UKPASS entry or up to date UCAS entries.

Lastly, lastly I have discovered that the university updates the UCAS content only once a year and that this happens in July, so you need to get busy with that now otherwise you might miss the boat. There seems to be no system whereby when a course is validated or revalidated that it get automatically listed by the university in UCAS or UKPASS which in my humble opinion is a systems problem which needs sorting out.

New marketing person is very switch on and I think has grasped the importance of UCAS in the context of basically no other visibility and I think getting it sorted. But there's more attention being given to the university site, it seems, than our presence on UCAS. That's like all the attention going on arranging flowers in the reception area of the building (granted it makes an impression on the visitors we have from time to time) - but at the same time ignoring a 2 minute slot on peak time ITV (which is roughly what the UCAS page is for is by way of metaphor).