Tips for Blogs | Webmaster's Blog

How Blogs Support Your Website and Boost Engagement

A well-structured blog isn’t just a standalone piece of content—it’s a powerful companion to your CMS website. When used strategically, blogs can drive traffic, enhance user experience, and improve your website’s search engine ranking. But how exactly do you integrate blogs effectively with your site?

Driving Traffic to Your Blog

To maximize the impact of your blog, you should actively direct traffic to it through multiple channels:

Social Media – Share blog posts on platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to engage your audience.
Email Campaigns – Include blog content in newsletters or targeted emails to provide value to subscribers.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Optimize blog posts with relevant keywords to increase visibility in search results.
Website Links and Feeds – Feature blog content on your website’s homepage and relevant internal pages to make it easily accessible.

Integrating Blog Content with Your Website

Your blog should seamlessly connect with your website by feeding relevant content onto the appropriate pages. This ensures that visitors can find valuable insights without having to navigate away from the main site.

Homepage Integration – Main news and updates from your blog should appear on your homepage to keep visitors informed.
Service-Specific Blog Placement – Blogs related to specific services or programs should be embedded on corresponding webpages. For instance, an advising-related blog should be featured on the Advising page to provide students with helpful resources.

By strategically incorporating blog content into your CMS, you create a dynamic, informative experience for your audience while strengthening your website’s authority and visibility.

Tips

Several of Michigan Tech’s blogs are used for recruitment purposes—posting student stories, research news, or program highlights. Other blogs are used to provide students with course and other advising information, as a newsletter, or to share information about the department, program, or service. You should understand why you blog—to drive enrollment, provide information, etc. These tips can help provide a better user experience and meet the needs of your audiences.

Site Settings

CTA Buttons

News blogs for departments with a prospective student audience should include call-to-action buttons in the right sidebar. If you are unsure, check your main website—if the buttons are included at the top of the footer, you should also include them in the sidebar of the blog. Exceptions to this are advising, student news, and student job posting blogs.

We have three key recruitment call-to-action buttons—Request Information, Schedule a Visit, and Apply Now. These are typically included on academic program and other recruitment webpages. Since the readers could be either undergraduate or graduate students, you would want to link to the pages that provide information for both of these audiences:

Request Information: https://www.mtu.edu/request/
Schedule a Visit: https://www.mtu.edu/visit/
Apply Now: https://www.mtu.edu/apply/

If you would like help adding these buttons to your blog, you can email webmaster@mtu.edu, otherwise, follow these instructions.

From the Appearance option in the left menu, select Customize.
Select the Widgets menu.
Click the +.
Select the Custom HTML option.
Paste the following code in the Content field.

<a class=”button” href=”https://www.mtu.edu/request/”>Request Information</a>
<a class=”button” href=”https://www.mtu.edu/visit/”>Schedule a Visit</a>
<a class=”button” href=”https://www.mtu.edu/apply/”>Apply Now</a>
Click the up arrow in the menu above the HTML, if needed, until it is at the top of the list.
Click Publish.

Categories and Tags

Commit to using 15 or fewer categories on your blog and ensure that all posts have at least one category. A category should be used on several posts each year. Use Tags for infrequent topics, instead of using categories. College-level news blogs should have general categories plus a category for each department, center/institute, and program that have their own websites.

Never use the Uncategorized category and if you have live posts with that category, remove it. When creating a new post, if you do not choose a category before saving or publishing, the system will automatically assign Uncategorized. You would then need to uncheck it and check the correct one(s).

Sidebar Widgets

Except for some specialty blog sites, like the Webmaster’s Blog, you should not include widgets in the sidebar other than those listed here.

Latest Posts

All blogs should include the Latest Posts widget. For advising blogs, this should be the first widget in the right sidebar. For other blogs, this should be after the Archives.

To turn on the Recent Posts:

From the Appearance option in the left menu, select Customize.
Select the Widgets menu.
Click the +.
Add the Widget Group.
Inside the Widget Group click the + button.
Select the Latest Posts option.
Click the three dot icon in the menu just above the widget and select Show more settings.
1. Scroll to the bottom and enter the number of posts you’d like to show. This should be no more than seven. The default of five is a good option.
2. Do not change other default settings.
Click the < button near the top of the left pane to return to the Right Sidebar Widgets menu.
Click and add a Title. We recommend Latest Posts.
Make other sidebar edits or click Publish.

If you click in the outer Widget Group, near the title you can move this section up or down to the recommended position using the arrow icons.

Author’s Name

We recommend that authors choose to display both their first and last names, not just a first name or user ID. This must be set on each individual user’s account and it makes the content more personal for prospective students and other audiences.

From the Users option in the left menu, select Profile.
Scroll down to the Name section.
In the Display name publicly as section, choose the option that shows your full name.
Scroll to the bottom of the page and click Update Profile.

If the user is not able to do this themselves, you can contact webmaster@mtu.edu with the person’s user ID and request that the display be changed to their name.

Home Breadcrumb and Navigation

Make sure the Home breadcrumb linking back to your website is on. Other links to your homepage are not needed.

From the Appearance option in the left menu, select Customize.
Select the Michigan Tech Theme menu.
Check Enable Breadcrumbs checkbox.
Enter the URL for your website homepage in the Breadcrumbs Home URL field. Use the full URL including https://.
Click the Publish button.

Make sure your website navigation appears across the top of the blog as another way for users to get back to your regular webpages.

From the Appearance option in the left menu, select Customize.
Select the Michigan Tech Theme menu.
Enter the URL for your website homepage in the CMS Site URL field. Use the full URL including https://.
Check the Enable Top Navigation checkbox.
Click the Publish button.

Footer Buttons and Site Contact Information

Advising, student news, and student job posting blogs should not turn on the footer buttons. All other blogs should replicate what their website does. Almost blogs should pull their Site Contact Information from the main website. To enable this:

From the Appearance option in the left menu, select Customize.
Select the Michigan Tech Theme menu.
Make sure the URL for your website homepage is listed in the CMS Site URL field. Use the full URL including https://.
Check the Pull Footer checkbox.
Check the appropriate button options as included on the website. You should check all boxes, only the Give button box, or only the three recruitment buttons boxes.
1. Show Apply Button
2. Show Give Button
3. Show Request Information Button
4. Show Visit Button
Click the Publish button.

Remove Old Posts

If your blog has been around for a while, we suggest removing any posts over 10 years old that don’t have a meaningful amount of traffic. To do this you can check the analytics and move old all posts without much traffic to the Trash.

Posts are still accessible in the Trash but are not available on the live site. You would then be able to permanently delete the posts from the Trash or restore them if desired.

Advising blogs should ensure that posts with older dates are reviewed regularly for accuracy. To avoid student confusion, update the Publish date in the Post menu in the right pane to today’s date whenever you review or update a post.

Excerpts (or Read More Block)

If your posts are several paragraphs long, use the excerpt setting or Read More block so only a portion of the post displays on the listing pages. If most of your posts are longer, you can use the Excerpt option to set the parameters for all posts on your blog at once, otherwise, you can manually set the Read More block for individual posts. Read more about these options and how to use them in Excerpt or Full Post on Blog Listing Pages.

Using excerpts/read mores makes your blog homepage feed more manageable for your audiences to scroll through and digest all the different posts you have—especially on mobile devices. However, be sure that at least some of the body content is displayed and not just the post title!

Every Post

Remember, you cannot use emojis in WordPress.

Yes, this tip is repeated because it can be done as a site setting or on individual posts! You can use the Read More block on individual posts if you only have a few that are long, otherwise, use the excerpt setting. Read more about these options and how to use them in Excerpt or Full Post on Blog Listing Pages.

Using excerpts/read mores makes your blog homepage feed more manageable for your audiences to scroll through and digest all the different posts you have—especially on mobile devices.

Frequency of Posts

New posts should be added to blogs regularly to keep the audience engaged and avoid having old content displayed on the webpage it is being fed into, every other month at a minimum. For blogs being used as newsletters and college-level news blogs, try to post monthly. Advisors should review advising blogs at least every semester and update the publish date within WordPress any time a post is reviewed or updated so students know that the content is recent and up-to-date.

Add Links

Recruitment Focus

Most of your blog traffic probably comes from social media posts and search engines—which means the user is often using a phone, jumping right into your blog post. Make it easy for them to navigate to your key recruitment webpages by adding relevant recruitment links—degree, category, and department—from your CMS website right into your blog post. Examples:

If you mention a specific degree, link to that degree’s webpage.
If you mention undergraduate degrees in general, link to your tab-level undergraduate page.
If you mention an academic department, link to that department’s homepage.

Not only will adding these recruitment links to your blog posts make it easier for users to request information, schedule a visit, or apply now, but it will also boost your website’s search engine optimization (SEO). Strong interlinking between your blog and CMS website is vital to your SEO success.

If your blog post does not include any recruitment links, ask yourself: is the topic worth posting? If nothing else, consider adding a standard outro statement to the end. For example, the College of Computing recently used:

The Michigan Tech Department of Computer Science offers bachelor of science degrees in Computer Science, Software Engineering, and Cybersecurity, which is offered jointly with the Department of Applied Computing. Graduate programs include master of science degrees in Computer Science, Cybersecurity, and Data Science; and PhD programs in Computer Science and Computational Science and Engineering, which is jointly offered with other Michigan Tech academic departments. It is a department of the Michigan Tech College of Computing, the first and only college focused solely on computing in Michigan, and one of only a few such academic units in the nation.

This is a perfect paragraph to add recruitment links going to degree, category, and/or department blog posts.

Any Blog

Users may get to your blog from social media posts, emails, or search engines rather than the feed on your website, which means they are often jumping right into your blog post. Make it easy for them to navigation to your key pages by adding relevant links to important pages on your website.

If you mention a program or service, link to that webpage.
Advising blog may have many links to the Registrar’s website or other specific degree requirement pages.

Adding appropriate links will help your users get the information they need, but it can also boost your website’s search engine optimization (SEO). Strong interlinking between your blog and CMS website is vital to your SEO success.

Preview

Within wp-admin, when creating posts, the styling of the blocks is not always shown the same way the final post will look. Be sure to preview your posts before publishing to make sure the blocks look the way you expect them to. Click the Preview option at the top of the screen and choose Preview in a new tab.

Yoast SEO

The Yoast plugin is a great way to improve the search engine optimization and social sharing customization of your individual blog posts. This is especially important for blogs with an external audience, not so much for advising, student news, and student job posting blogs. Click the Yoast logo in the upper right of the screen to get started.

On the Google Preview add a meta description. The description is displayed as part of the information in search engine results and is meant to provide the user with information about the content of the page. If you don’t want to write a custom description, at least copy your introductory sentence or paragraph and paste it in. Copy and paste the same Google meta description into the Facebook description under Facebook preview and the Twitter description under Twitter preview.
Open the Readability analysis and consider incorporating the feedback provided into your post.
If you want to designate an image to be used when the blog post is shared on social media, select the image under the Facebook preview and/or Twitter preview. LinkedIn will use the same settings you use on Facebook.
You typically don’t need to customize the SEO title, Facebook title, or Twitter title unless the post title is very long. Use a custom title in these fields that is 54 characters or shorter so it is not cut off in search engines or social media platforms. Copy and paste the same title under Google preview, Facebook preview, and Twitter preview, deleting anything that was already there.