Illinois Education and Technology Conference

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Analytics,
routing, and your school

• Nathan Pedretti
• nathan.pedretti_at_gmail.com
• Independent Website DeveloperNorth Chicago CUSD
  187

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BIG PICTURE
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BIG PICTURE, II

• Rally all of your community resources (people,
  programs, processes) to help students achieve
• Soyes, were talking about websites, but
  websites that help lead the school improvement
  process and ultimately help kids learn.

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Why websites?

• Your website is the de facto reference for your
  school
• Lots of other sites talk about your school, but
  only your school site tells your side of the
  story.
• Your website should be one of your primary
  community relations tools
• Make it as effective as it can be.

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Search Engine Optimization

• Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process
  of improving the volume and quality of traffic to
  a web site from search engines via "natural"
  ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results.
• Quality people find what they need.
• Source Wikipedia http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea
  rch_engine_optimization

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Why SEO/Analytics?

• For Administrators
• Money / Time
• Effective websites deflect questions from your
  office
• Let people find out what they want online
• Primary tool in community relations efforts, make
  it effective

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Why SEO/Analytics?

• For Technology Staff
• Hugely powerful tools to track and manage your
  technology spending
• Why spend time/money on sites that have no appeal
  to community?
• Focus discussion on issues that affect relevancy
  and deflect issues about color/logos.

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Why SEO/Analytics?

• For Teachers
• Its really neat?
• Because you want to find needed information on
  your school website, too.
• Creating web-ready content is a huge industry and
  future area of employment for our students.

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Google Analytics

• Powerful data gathering tool provided free of
  charge by Google to help organizations better
  optimize their websites.

Look at that traffic spike
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A Quick guide to SEO

• Sign-up for a Google Analytics Account
• Add the javascript code to your website template
  so that it appears on all of your pages
• Wait a month to develop a good set of data to
  work from. In the mean time
• Develop consistent site-wide templates and page
  structures

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Header
Content / Copy
Navigation
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Quick guide to SEO

• Wait a month (continued)
• Create consistent navigation structures
• Update your text with headers (H1, H2, H3), and
  identify all of your images
• Change links to be descriptive and meaningful
• View Forrestal Schools November Newsletter
• Use active text
• Add eye-catching, useful, linked graphics

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DESCRIPTIVE LINKS, USEFUL GRAPHICS
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Quick Guide to SEO

• With analytics data in hand
• Consider rewriting pages with high exit rates
• Add more links text/images (to relevant
  content) on pages with high bounce rates
• Use search engine to query highest keyword terms
  and see what you get Is it what you want?
  Rewrite!
• Reach out to new partners by seeing who is
  already linking to you via referral links

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Bounce/Exit Rates
HIGHER
LOW
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Referrals/Keywords
BIG NUMBER
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SEO Keyword Humor

• Every year I laugh because you can see
• Schools starting everyone searches for first
  day of school .
• First snow snow day
• Big event prom pictures .
• FUNNY, BUT HOW WILL YOUR SITE RESPOND TO THESE
  REQUESTS?

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Quick Guide to SEO

• Create a campaign to drive traffic to your site
• Source (fall newsletter)
• Medium (email)
• Term (n/a for paid keywords)
• Content (for ad differentiation)
• Campaign (the umbrella name)
• Use Googles campaign URL builder to tag links
  http//www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/
  answer.py?hlenanswer55578

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Campaigns for Schools

• Print Campaign
• Send out a print flyer with a large link for more
  information like
• http//www.yourschool.com/fallflyer.htm
• Use your analytics tool to see how many visitors
  actually visited the page
• 400 flyers, 100 visitors, 25 click-through rate
• This is 100 more people visiting your site to
  learn about your people, programs, and processes.

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Campaigns for Schools

• Email campaign
• Send out an email with multiple links each
  embedded with campaign tracking variables
• See how many visitors click through to your site.
• 800 emails, 400 visitors, 50 click-through-rate
• Did your users find what they were looking for?
  Check the bounce rate (less than 35 is good,
  more than 50 and there is a disconnect between
  your message and your site).

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Quick Guide to SEO

• Create a case study to identify routing issues
• Who are you?
• What page do you start on?
• What content would appeal to you?
• Does it stick out so that you want to follow it?
• Where can you go from the next page?
• Does the site help or hurt navigation?

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Personal Advertising

• Meeting Expectations What your community expects
  to find online
• Friday, 1245 pm, Capital III
• Communication planning
• Website Strategy Identity, transparency, and
  e-business
• Occurred yesterday
• PPT available online

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PPTs available

• On my website http//www.nathanpedretti.com/
• Or, you can give me your card and Ill email them
  to you.

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Seven things to do today

• Put more photos online
• Update your staff information
• Show off your calendar of events
• Highlight your programs
• PDF your newsletters and get them online
• Use Google Analytics (come to SEO)
• Create simple update policies
• Use your website as a reference source
• Update your email signature