Unlocking the Power of Technical SEO for Universities

Universities today need more than just an attractive website to stand out. Prospective students search for information online so optimising your university’s website for search engines is crucial. Technical search engine optimisation (SEO) ensures that your website is not only user-friendly but also search engine-friendly. Today we will delve into the core components of technical SEO and how universities can leverage them to improve their online visibility and performance.

What is Technical SEO?

Vital to optimising university websites, technical SEO refers to optimising website and server aspects that help search engine spiders crawl and index your site more effectively. This type of SEO is essential for improving a website’s visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs).

Crawling: Making Your Website Accessible

Crawling is the process by which search engines discover new or updated pages on your website. To ensure that search engines can crawl your site effectively:

• Use Robots.txt: This file guides search engine bots on which pages to crawl and which to avoid. Ensure it is properly configured to allow crawlers access to important pages and resources.
• Create an XML Sitemap: An XML sitemap provides search engines with a roadmap of your website’s structure, helping them find and index your pages more efficiently. Make sure your sitemap is updated regularly and submitted to search engines.

Indexing: Ensuring Your Content is Found

Once a search engine has crawled your website, it needs to index the content. Indexing is the process of storing and organising content so that it can be retrieved in response to a search query.

• Use Structured Data: Implementing structured data (or schema markup) helps search engines understand the context of your content. For universities, this could include details like course offerings, faculty information, and event schedules.
• Avoid Duplicate Content: Ensure that each page on your site has unique content to prevent indexing issues. Use canonical tags to indicate the preferred version of a page if duplicate content is unavoidable.

Rendering: Making Your Content Viewable

Rendering is how search engines process and display your website’s content to users. Proper rendering ensures that search engines understand and correctly interpret your content.

• Mobile-Friendly Design: With more users accessing websites via mobile devices, it is crucial to have a responsive design that adapts to various screen sizes. Google’s mobile-first indexing means your mobile site is a critical component of your SEO strategy.
• Optimise for JavaScript: If your site relies heavily on JavaScript, ensure that search engines can properly render and index the content. Test your site using tools like Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to check for rendering issues.

Web Architecture: Building a Solid Foundation

A well-structured web architecture enhances both user experience and search engine crawling.

• Logical URL Structure: Use descriptive and concise URLs that reflect the hierarchy of your content. For example, www.university.edu/undergraduate/programs/computer-science is more informative than www.university.edu/page?id=123.
• Internal Linking: Create a robust internal linking strategy to help users and search engines navigate your site. Ensure important pages are easily accessible from your homepage and other high-traffic areas.

Page Speed: Enhancing User Experience

Page speed is a critical factor for both user experience (UX) and SEO. Slow-loading pages can lead to higher bounce rates and lower search rankings.

• Optimise Images and Media: Compress images and use modern formats like WebP to reduce file sizes without compromising quality. Implement lazy loading to defer loading of off-screen images.
• Leverage Caching: Use browser caching to store frequently accessed resources locally, reducing load times for repeat visitors.
• Minimise Code: Remove unnecessary code and use minification tools to reduce the size of CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files.

Conclusion

We have barely scratched the surface but technical SEO should be an essential part of any university’s digital strategy. Focusing on just these five things – crawling, indexing, rendering, web architecture, and page speed, is a great start and will make your website optimised for search engines and provide a seamless experience for users. Implementing these best practices will help improve your university’s visibility, attract prospective students, and ultimately enhance your institution’s online presence.

Contact us at hello@nextlevelmkt.net if you need support in website creation and SEO. Using WordPress and Divi by Elegant Themes, we create modern and secure websites optimised for search engines.