Department blogs are a great way to push out your department-specific news to your website and keep your website fresh.
A number of departments routinely repost Tech Today announcements and that is great. Because Tech Today is meant for internal traffic only, we welcome users to repost that content without any reference or link to Tech Today. This will better serve our users by keeping them on external-facing websites and will save them a click. You should avoid using “from Tech Today” or “Read More at Tech Today.” Since Tech Today is internal, you don’t need to link back to it to avoid plagiarism.
Also, you are encouraged to remember these tips when creating blog posts:
- Post often, the more people see your blog change the more they will come back and read again.
- Try to use images as much as possible, whether a faculty image or something to do with the text. Remember to add ALT text to all images.
- Use captions on photos to add more description.
- Link any event mentioned in the blog post to the event on the University Event Calendar (Hint: you should be adding your events to the calendar too!)
- Link any Michigan Tech faculty mentioned in the post to their faculty page on your departmental website.
- Link keywords to your program pages or other important pages on your website.
- Break up bigger paragraphs into smaller ones, use headings and bullets, and highlight keywords using bold text to make it easier to read online.
- Use blockquotes into your posts as a visual way to break up large amounts of text.
- Use categories and add tags to your posts.
Check out an example of a blog post from the School of Business and Economics that incorporates these principles.
Thank you to Heather Powers, CSA Digital Specialist, for passing on these tips!