The Bowdoin web site and search engines, SEO case study
Build Web Pages for Search Engines (Bowdoin)
I quickly outline what a good web page built for search engines is about. Visit most pages on the web site to find out, especially in the News section.
Building a high result web page is not difficult. You can not however obtain search results for content that does not exist! The words must be in the web page in order for search returns to happen. 🙂
It’s pedantic yes, but what I’m pointing to is the need to always write in anticipation of the user.
This should occur at all levels and a webinar may not be the avenue to achieve desired results since we haven’t even decided what we want our results to be!
Bowdoin Search Case Study:
If for instance, the college wants to be known for the blue lobster phenomenon I give two examples:
Question: where is Bowdoin?
A search for “blue lobster“:
What? The NYTimes just wrote this story on the 15th and includes references to Bowdoin College! Our story was written on Feb 24th.
Answer: Try a different key word search.
Search for “lobster blues”
OK we come up as the third result. Not bad. The radio show page has more has more inbound (google has actually played this down) links in and the page includes more keyword references to blue lobster.
The lesson? Bowdoin either wants to be know for singing the lobster blues, or for research on blue lobsters. Maybe both because on is catchier! We should try both perhaps. Publish the story with another title, or we could use sub-titles…