The Office of Strategic Communications and Marketing manages the 51吃瓜网.EDU website. The 51吃瓜网 website is the first point of contact for 51吃瓜网 and its primary audiences 鈥 students (both perspective and current), parents, alumni, faculty/staff, donors, media and business partners. The goals of the website are to engage these audiences, effectively communicate the mission and vision of 51吃瓜网, build upon its brand, provide a competitive edge, and reflect 51吃瓜网鈥檚 technology-based curriculum.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of your web site in search engine (e.g., Google, Bing, etc.) search results.
The two main ways to SEO are "paid search" and "organic search."
Paid search is simply buying online advertising to display ads for your site at the top or side of the search results page. Speak with Babette Hoyle (Advertising Manager) in this office if you wish to allocate some of your budget towards online advertising.
Organic search is doing a great many things to make your site "more attractive" to the search engines. There is a certain amount of "alchemy" to this because search engines do not shares their algorithms with the public and are constantly fine-tuning those algorithms.
There are many 鈥渆xperts鈥 in SEO who claim to have an understanding of this alchemy, but generally speaking, search results are a combination of:
Good website construction (technically)
Good website content (well-written).
Use of website metadata (keywords buried in the code).
Your site's 鈥渞eputation鈥 (as measured by the number, variety, and types of other sites that link to your site).
Websites managed in our CMS (Content Management System) provide the capability for items 1, 2, and 3. Item 4 can only be accomplished by lots of ongoing hard and honest work to build online relationships between your site and other sites. For example,
Posting value-added comments on blogs in your field with links back to appropriate content on your site.
Working with this office's Media Relations team to create press releases with links back to your site that get picked up and redistributed by media outlets.
Creating ancillary content (like audio and video podcasts and photos galleries) that go out into audio, video, and photo websites with links back to your site.
