Some SEO Tips for Fraternities
When it comes to search engine optimization, there are both good and evil ways to increase your rankings. The evil ways rarely prevail, so here’s the path to righteousness.
What’s SEO and PageRank?
SEO is marketing is all about appealing to machine algorithms to increase search engine relevance and ultimately web traffic. Like the old brick-and-mortar days of offline stores, Google’s Pagerank is the electronic equivalent of word-of-mouth.
PageRank is a link analysis algorithm which assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set. The more websites/users that link to your website, the higher your PageRank will become.
Fraternities and sororities have a natural user-base of websites that often choose to link back to your headquarters’ domain: they’re called chapters. When 300 chapters all link to your domain, you already have a head start on getting a good PageRank.
But there’s so much more you can do to improve your SEO.
It’s the Content, Stupid
As more and more members are maintaining personal blogs, you want them to link back to you too. But you have to provide a reason for them to link to your website. The best way to do that is to provide quality content that is updated frequently. Lambda Chi Alpha does this by posting its membership magazine online, adding a new issue every month. That’s more than 10,000 words of fresh content added to our domain every 30 days.
Both users and search engines love new content.
If your office doesn’t have the resources to generate 10,000 words of fresh content every month, then consider giving your users/members the ability to create content on your domains for you.
Publicly accessible bulletin boards, comments, blogs, and wikis are all great tools that invite users to add content to your domain. Lambda Chi Alpha uses comments for each article in its magazine as well as a community blog for users to say whatever is on their mind.
Make it Accessible
Correctly using W3C standards such as XHTML and CSS will improve the readability of your code for search engine spiders. Optimized code provides a good content-to-code ratio, which search engines appreciate.
Designing websites with complex TABLE layouts and a bunch of IMG tags dilutes your content with a bunch of unnecessary code. I have redesigned several 1990s websites using XHTML and CSS, shaving off 50 to 75 percent of the code while obtaining the exact same look and feel. That’s 50 to 75 percent less code that Google and Yahoo have to parse when indexing your site’s content.
Every time I redesigned a website to meet today’s accessibility and standard guidelines, the site experienced an increase in SEO.
To learn more about SEO, accessibility, and standards, consider visiting these resources: