How Online University Marketing Plans Can Help You Attract More Students

Online university marketing plans are an important way for attracting more students, even if you belong among the top performing schools, since the majority of young people these days spend most of their time in front of their computers. When the time comes for them to make decisions as to where they will go to college, they will make an online search as to what options are available for the courses they want to take. If your university does not make the top three, potential students will most likely ignore you since most people do not go beyond the first three or five results. If they fail to find what they want in the top-ranked results, they will probably make another search rather than continue looking at lower-ranked results with less relevance to what they are searching for.

For university marketing plans, the most important pages to optimize for search engines are those relating to their course offerings. In order to rank high in results index pages, you will need to include relevant keywords in these pages. When choosing keywords, make sure that they represent a search term that students might actually use when conducting searches. For example, if you are a college in Chicago that offers nursing courses, you might target the keyword  Chicago nursing degrees . Once you have identified your main keyword, you should include it in the title tag (the words that appear on your link) as well as in the first sentence of your page text, in page titles and subtitles. You should also sprinkle it throughout your text and include it in the last paragraph. To further add relevancy to the keyword, you can use variations of it in the text, such as  Chicago nursing courses or Chicago nursing degree.

Click on the PLAY button to watch video

You can also use keywords in your alt tags (the tags that indicate where an image is to be placed on a web page) or on image captions. When choosing a location to mention as part of the keyword, be specific but not too specific, i.e. mention the general location but not the specific town unless it is well known. For example, if your college is based in Springfield, Illinois, target the keyword  Illinois nursing degrees  rather than  Springfield Illinois nursing degrees  since the first keyword is what surfers will more likely be looking for, although you should also use the second keyword.

Online university marketing plans should also include provision for getting backlinks to your site. High quality inbound links are one factor that search engines take into account when ranking web pages. Pages with more relevant links will rank higher than those with fewer links. There are a number of ways that universities can get quality links. One is to ask their partner institutions to link back to them. Another is to ask professors who have their own blogs or websites to provide links. Or you can promote your course offerings to local or national news outlets, and then ask for a link back to your site. However, when asking for links, remember that quality is as important as quantity. Do not link for the sake of linking since poor quality links will drag down your rankings.