Webmaster's Blog

Digital Marketers Meetings

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Digital Services in University Marketing and Communications hosts a Digital Marketers Meeting every other month. Digital Marketers is a group for digital platform managers (digital ads, photo/video production, social media accounts, websites, etc) across campus. Our discussion is focused on digital content production and best practices. We also provide a great setting to stay informed and plug into recruitment and reputation initiatives spearheaded by University Relations and Enrollment.

To receive a Google Calendar invitation for the meetings that includes a Zoom link, the campus community can join our email list.

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Siteimprove CMS Content Editors Dashboard

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Michigan Tech has been using a tool called Siteimprove to find various issues on Modern Campus CMS webpages. The system has the ability to send scheduled reports to people on a regular basis. UMC created a custom CMS Content Editors Dashboard listing several quality, accessibility, search engine optimization (SEO), and editorial issues in one place. While Siteimprove has many more reports available, the selected issues have been identified as within the control of departmental CMS editors. This Dashboard replaces the previously available separate Broken Links and Misspellings reports.

Dashboard Reports

The CMS Content Editors Dashboard includes the following reports, subject to change at any time:

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Analytics and SEO Dashboards

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A dashboard for Google Analytics 4 (GA4) data and a Search Engine Optimization dashboard are now available for Modern Campus CMS websites, Michigan Tech Blogs, and Michigan Tech Events Calendar in Looker Studio. In the GA4 dashboard, you will find charts with analytics for:

  • Page traffic and users
  • Acquisition
  • User demographics
  • Device information
  • 404 hits
  • Vanity URLs
  • Files and outbound links
  • Anchor, call, and email links
  • Buttons, cards, and touts
  • Accordions
  • Pop-ups, forms, and gift box shares
  • Header media and image galleries
  • Lightboxes (pop-up images)
  • Tabs
  • Videos
  • Search terms

The SEO dashboard provides details on traffic coming from Google Search and how that traffic converts to prospective student leads.

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HTTP vs HTTPS URLs

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When using URLs on webpages, documents, or other files, it is important to pay attention to the first part of the URL—HTTP or HTTPS. This could apply to hyperlinks, iFrame code, embedded images and videos, etc.

The “s” in HTTPS means that the connection is secure. URLs that use HTTP are not secure and malicious parties could steal the data being sent. They may intercept usernames, passwords, or other information filled out in a form; credit card information; or other personal data. For details on how HTTP and HTTPS work, there’s an easy-to-understand article that explains it using a carrier pigeon example.

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Google Search

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The search functionality on the Michigan Tech website is powered by Google. It works the same way as a search on google.com, except it only searches within the mtu.edu domain, subdomains, and sites that we manually tell Google are also owned by Michigan Tech (such as superiorideas.org or michigantechhuskies.com).

Crawling, Indexing, and Ranking

In order for webpages to show up in search results, they must be crawled by the search engine’s bot. The bot navigates pages it has already crawled and follows links to find new pages. The new pages found are added to an index that the search engine pulls results from.

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How to Collect Good Student Testimonials

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Student testimonials are vital to university marketing content. When prospective students learn about the Michigan Tech experience directly from the source, it creates a deeper emotional connection. Students getting their hands dirty, doing the work, and sharing their experiences and excitement drives potential students to see themselves doing the same thing. They really want to be at our university doing what they love to do.

How do you grab those moments to share with prospective students? Ask current students to highlight the access, opportunities, experiences, and self-improvement they’re engaged in at Michigan Tech. You can capture their perspectives in person, virtually, or even by email.

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Preview in Edit vs Preview Tabs

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Depending on the content on any given page, the pages within the CMS can take a while to load. In order to speed up the load time, UMC has been implementing processes that may change the quality or accuracy of the view on the Edit tab only. For an accurate preview of the page, use the Preview tab. This preview will not be affected by the noted changes.

The following content may not display exactly as it would on the live page when viewing from the Edit tab:

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Crazy Egg Analytics

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UMC has a limited subscription to an analytics service called Crazy Egg. This is a great tool to use in conjunction with Google Analytics that can give visual information about user habits on a single page. The reports include a heatmap of user clicks, a scrollmap of how far down the page users are scrolling, confetti showing specific clicks with a secondary dimension, and an overlay option that provides even more details.

Since Crazy Egg is set up on a page-by-page basis it is better suited for your most important pages, such as homepages, and you do have to plan ahead as it must be set to begin gathering data and then runs for up to 60 days. It is a bit harder to use this tool for historical comparisons but is a great tool to use in advance of a site or homepage redesign.

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