Create Institution Landing Pages: SEO Optimization

An institution can create a customized, branded Transferology® landing page to help promote the college or university to prospective students. When navigating to Transferology through the institution's referral link or badge, students will see the customized page (assuming it is published) instead of the CollegeSource-branded homepage. This article within Create Institution Landing Pages: An Overview Guide explains how School Admins can modify the institution landing page's default page description and keywords to help make the institution's landing page more findable within search engines.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a configuration process aimed at improving a website's presence within search engines. It is designed to help individuals find a website more efficiently by supplying search engines with words and phrases that people may use to locate the site.

The following information from the institution landing page will become available to search engines upon publication:

• Logo Image and Header Image Alternate Text.
• The Page Description.
• Keywords.

Transferology supplies search engines with default page descriptions and keywords to help direct users to institution landing pages. School Administrators can customize this information within the Institution Template to supply different or additional content by entering text into the blank fields.

SEO Page Description

A page description is a short piece of text explaining a website's content. It is designed to give search engine users an idea of the page's focus so a person can decide whether to visit it. The more users that visit the page after searching for particular phrases, the higher a search engine may prioritize the page in its results.

Below is the page description that appears when an individual searches for "Transferology" in Google:

By default, each institution's landing page has a similar description:

Transferology shows how courses you have taken or plan to take transfer to (Institution Name) for credit. It's a free transfer tool for students!

To use a different description:

1. Enter a description between 120-155 characters into the box below.
   • This will override the default page description above.

2. Select Save Changes.

• A pop-up will appear noting that the user is about to make changes to the landing page for the institution. Doing so will make these changes visible to the public if the landing page has been published. Make sure to review changes via the Preview Changes button.
  • Select Yes to proceed with saving changes.
  • A confirmation will appear indicating that changes have been saved.

If the landing page has been published, the updated page description will be available for search engines to gather. Search engine crawlers may take anywhere from several days to weeks to locate and index this information.

SEO Page Keywords

Keywords are important terms and phrases within a website that help the search engine (and thus the search engine user) locate sites meeting the search criteria. The more users that visit the page after searching for particular keywords, the higher a search engine may prioritize the page in its results.

By default, each institution's landing page has been set by CollegeSource with the following keywords:

courses, transfer, credits, transferology

To use different keywords:

1. Enter key phrases into the box below in a comma-separated list of no more than 250 characters.

• This will override the default keywords above.

2. Select Save Changes to save work on the landing page.

• A pop-up will appear noting that the user is about to make changes to the landing page for the institution. Doing so will make these changes visible to the public if the landing page has been published. Make sure to review changes via the Preview Changes button.
  • Select Yes to proceed with saving changes.
  • A confirmation will appear indicating that changes have been saved

If the landing page has been published, the updated keywords will be available for search engines to gather. Search engine crawlers may take anywhere from several days to weeks to locate and index this information.