Contents

University Web Services

Best Practices

Marketing Your Site

"Marketing" here means both getting your site listed at someone else's site (including requesting a spot on the university home pages), and improving how your site is listed in search engines.

Getting Listed

University Home Page

The content on the University's home page is tightly controlled. Requests to be added there may be directed to the web administrator for Marketing & Communications, but almost everything on the page is fixed and won't be changed. The significant exception is the news bulletins. Your news could get listed there for a limited time, but don't expect to have a permanent link.

University Top-Level Pages

The place for permanent links is one layer down. Almost any department, program, or center can be listed on the Index page, and most will also be listed on the appropriate Future Students, Current Students, Faculty & Staff, or Community page. The appropriate contact information is at the bottom of each page.

Other Links

Don't neglect getting listed elsewhere, though. You should consider other departments around campus, other campuses around the country, professional organizations, appropriate state agencies, and so on. The more linked your site, the more it will get found.

Getting Noticed

Links are only one way you should market your site. Print is still a viable medium, so you need to take advantage of it. Your url can go on business cards and letterhead, but it can also find its way into just about any print material that is intended for an audience rather than an individual.

Your employees should know the url and should be able to mention it at the appropriate time. They should know more than just the home page; they should know where certain kinds of information can be found, and what the address is. This is especially appropriate if you have staff that answer questions at a desk or over the phone. Give them a reference sheet they can keep handy.

Email announcements of any sort should always contain links to relevant points of your site. If there's nothing in particular to point the reader to, send them to your home page.

Search Engines

Different search engines use different algorithms for weighting the results of a search. Moreover, they keep those algorithms a closely-guarded secret. So there's no way for you to know exactly what to do to produce a specific result.

There are, however, some things you can and should do on every page. Here's the list:

Who's Looking?

There's is a way to check to see who is linked to your pages. Go to Google and type: link:address/path
where address/path is the Boise State address down to a specific page. You cannot check who is linked to your site, because a site doesn't really exist, only individual pages exist.

Google will return a list of all pages that are linked to the page you gave it. It's an interesting exercise and will go far to explain why your page isn't further up the results, for part of Google's weighting algorithm is how many pages are linked to your page.

Search Engines

Many search engine sites will let you submit a url. This is not necessary, but it will usually speed up how quickly your site gets indexed.

If You Move

Here are the steps to take if you change the address of one of your web sites.