Being Found: Add Your Keyword Matches to nd.edu Search

I don’t know how many of you know this but you can get keyword matches (keymatches) for terms associated with your website for free from the Library.

The library controls the Google Search Appliance, which powers the university’s overall search here on campus.  So if you go to nd.edu and type something into search, the search engine results page will display everything that it deems a match.  But this search is in a controlled environment – mainly every website and database that the library points the search appliance at.

Over the course of a year, this search gets hit about 2 million times by about 500K people or individual computers.  That’s a lot.  Are you showing up for the terms best associated with your terms?

For example let’s take the term “photography”.  When you search for photography on nd.edu, agency.nd.edu shows up first along with artdept.nd.edu and onmessage.nd.edu.  These are relevant but we would also like photo.nd.edu to show up.  But since this website is mostly photos without a lot of text (and it’s a newer site), it doesn’t show up.

So we asked for the keymatch “photography” to be associated with photos.nd.edu.  Now it shows up first like a Google Adwords advertisement – except you don’t have to pay for this term.  That’s the best thing about us owning our own search appliance.  We control the internal search.

How do you get a keymatch for your website?  The friendly folks at the Library are more than happy to help you.  Just send your keymatches to gsa-admin@listserv.nd.edu.  They will set them up for you.

How do you know which keymatches to set?  Well, that’s a whole new post and I promise to get to it soon.  But for now, I would use your best judgement  on this.  It’s better to get the keymatches and be found then to wonder why no one ever visits your website.

Any questions?


Comments

17 responses to “Being Found: Add Your Keyword Matches to nd.edu Search”

  1. Fantastic Tip Don !

    Notre-Dame University Is Number #1 To #10 For Social Media…In Many Polls. KeyWords Drive Google…Not enough People Use Keywords.

    That’s how The Google Computer Operates.

    Social Media Keith –
    Fast Track 4U –
    Certified Social Marketing –
    Founding Member 1 of 100

    Home =
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  2. Having a blog on this network would provide a massive amount of value to search engine traffic.. surely..

  3. Notre-Dame University Is Number #1 To #10 For Social Media…In Many Polls. KeyWords Drive Google…Not enough People Use Keywords.

  4. If you need to find a list of related keywords for a particular subject I recommend using the Google keyword tool. It’s free to use and really helpful you just put in your main keyword and it will return the related keywords and search volumes. Make sure you check the phrase match check box though, then it will give you the most commonly typed in keyword phrases based on their search data. For example if you put in “sports nutrition” it will give related phrases like “body building supplement”, “amino acids” and so on. Hope that helps you guys anyway!

  5. A great keyword tool I explored. while http://library.nd.edu one will get different findings about the targeted keyword.

  6. This blog is great and it will for sure add a huge value to search engine traffic. Thank you ND.

  7. Wow! You guys are lucky. I don’t think my school does this, but I am going to check now, for sure. I have started a small business selling Denver phone systems that I would like to grow a bunch when I graduate. I never realized how important SEO was to businesses. You got some good info here.

    Thank you, Don!

  8. just blog walking, nice blog
    would you like to contribute create some article to my blog about search engine optimization…

  9. Great Tip!
    As more and more businesses implement online marketing strategy trying to get to first page on google, SEO is becoming more and more important. It’s much harder now to get to that golden first page. My new site http://www.odskodnina.pro is crawling up much slower than some other sites i’ve made have.

  10. some great seo stuff here, but we still use google keywords as a free tool

  11. Google Keyword Tool always, saves so much time!

  12. I agree. I even wrote them a long letter explaining how the whole “disabling features that were once available for free” wasn’t a good way to approach things but I guess they don’t care. They’ll die out to some other free service, like google. The problem is I use wolfram on school and work computers where you can’t store log in information, so every time I want to use it it’s a hassle to log in just to get features. not to mention the mailbox spam I don’t want from them. Just a terrible decision on wolfram’s part imo.

  13. Great Blog and great subject, google keywords are another tool that can still be used and reliable

  14. Great Work Guys, keep up the Support!

  15. Google keyword tool is a great free tool to find the keywords. You can also use Google insights for the keywords to find the new products

  16. Thats a great info on Keymatches. I am doing work on SEO, and it will help me a lot..

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