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Welcome to the new Studyabroad.com News! We are expanding the scope of the newsletter to include our Marketing Manager's wealth of knowledge. The newsletter will still contain articles from Mark Landon and the regular features you have come to expect. In addition, there will be an informative marketing article to give you insight on how to be successful on the web as well as articles from other staff members. Please enjoy the additional information! If you have any questions or comments on our new format, feel free to contact Lori Faunce at lori@gradschools.com or 1-877-4040EDU.
For $250 per week, you can purchase the Feature of the Week.
This is the first item to appear in the newsletter and can include up to 200 words. Feature of the Week ads are sold on a 'first come - first served' basis. Please inquire about availability. This is an excellent way to get your message out to students pro-actively.
***English.Studyabroad.com Master Sponsorships Available.
English.Studyabroad.com (http://english.studyabroad.com) is our new Gateway into our ESL directories. Like Master Sponsorships on the main Studyabroad.com home page, English.Studyaboad.com Master Sponsors get a link from the English.Studyabroad.com home page to their own web site, providing an opportunity to target prospective students from our most prominent position. Master Sponsorships include unlimited Standard Listings with Hot Buttons within the ESL section. For a limited time, these positions are available for US$3500 per year. English.Studyabroad.com is currently receiving more than 6,000 page views per week, and traffic will continue to grow. This results in a cost per impression of just over a penny! Please contact Mark Landon at 610-499-9200 for more information.
***Studyabroad.com receives top rating in Access Magazine.
Access Magazine, an insert into dozens of major Sunday newspapers throughout the US, recently reviewed Studyabroad.com and awarded us their 4-star
rating. The magazine features Internet sites and bills itself as 'the largest circulation Internet magazine.' It claims circulation of over 7,000,000! You can see our 4-star (highest available) review at: http://www.accessmagazine.com/scripts/review_template.cfm?reviewCatego ryID=541
For the first time, there will be four members of our staff at the conference. Joining founders Mark Landon and Mark Shay will be associates Erica Brechemin and Jennifer Lewis. Erica is employee #3 at Studyabroad.com. In fact, Mark and Mark made the decision to create Erica's position while on the flight home from their first conference in Phoenix in 1996. Erica joined the staff later that summer and has become an integral part of our organization, coordinating our free listing program as well as handling customer service and advertising sales. Jennifer joined our staff this spring as our Studyabroad.com content manager (read more below).
If you will be attending the conference, please stop by and say hi! We will be unveiling some great new features on the site, including some great new advertising opportunities with Studyabroad.com and Gradschools.com. Study abroad advisors are invited to stop by and sign up for one of our Advisor's Kits, which will be sent by mail in August. This year our Advisor Kits will include the new bound edition of our Studyabroad.com Handbook by Bill Hoffa.
Everyone who stops by our booth will win a prize. Stop by and pick up a Studyabroad.com sticker for your name-badge. Your sticker will have an invisible ink code telling you what prize you have won. The grand-prize is a hand-made, one-of-a-kind Studyabroad.com teddy bear! Other prizes include T-shirts, mouse-pads and stress-ball key-chains. Everyone is a winner!
Studyabroad.com on the Internet: A Free Report
Studyabroad.com will be distributing an eight-page report on student facts at the NAFSA annual conference in May. The report will contain information we have learned through our experience, surveys and log analysis about study abroad students. We are looking forward to sharing our knowledge and expertise with you! This valuable report is a must reading for study abroad program administrators. Ask for your copy at the Studyabroad.com booth at the conference.
<<<<In the late 1970's, an infant six weeks young sat on her daddy's lap behind the yoke of a Cessna 152. Some years later, my dad and I still fly together. In spite of my recent endeavors flying solo, I would actually prefer to steal aboard a 737, nestled cozily against the polished leather quasi-standard to the first class cabin and enfolded by a firm airline blanket. Pining for excitement and adventure, my eyes close in anxious await for the moment that I will hear the captain announce preparation for landing. 'Hurry it up, Dad', I have thought time and again.
From the traditional study abroad experience in France, to trekking through Europe with newfound "summer soul mates", packing at a moment's notice to fly across an ocean and from mastering chopsticks and snow surfing down a frozen waterfall, my wanderlust has fueled challenging opportunities. Experience and exposure [if two by sea] enable me with a unique skill set of academic training, cultural learning and travel knowledge. Studyabroad.com is the most exciting place of which I can conceive to impart the above.
Studyabroad.com is my new journey; landing has been announced and new forms of excitement and adventure beckon to me. So, my reservation is confirmed: I am here to stay. I will, of course, continue to fly and entertain short-term travel bids. >>>>
Search engine optimization refers to the designing of a web site in order to achieve high rankings in the search engine listings for your specified keywords.
KEYWORDS
Choosing the right keywords for your web site is getting to be tricky business. As the web is getting more crowded, it becomes harder to achieve high rankings with general keywords. Instead, you should focus on using more specific keywords and phrases. For example, if you ran a pet care web site, instead of the word "pet", you should use a more specific phrase such as "exotic animals" or "cat care", depending on the content of your site.
Write down a list of words and phrases that best describe your site. After you are finished your list, pick out three or four keywords that describe your content most specifically. Lastly, choose one that will be your primary keyword.
WHERE TO PUT YOUR KEYWORDS
Meta Tags
Meta Tags are still important in search engine optimization, however, they are becoming less so every day. Nonetheless, each important page on your web site should contain meta tags.
There are two types of meta tags that most search engines look for - the description and the keywords. The description meta tag is what the search engines use for the brief description of your site so it should be appealing to a reader and contain keywords (especially your primary keyword). It is placed inside the
tag and immediately follows the tag.The keyword meta tags is a list of keywords relevant to your site and does not appear in your search engine listing. The use of keyword meta tags is simply a method of letting search engines know for which search terms your site appear. Only keywords that appear in the body text of the page should be included in the keywords meta tags. Also, the primary keyword you chose should be listed first, followed by the second most relevant, and so on.
For the previous example of a pet web site (we'll say the content is primarily focused on cat pet care), the meta tags would look something like this:
<html>
<head>
<title>
Expert Cat Care
</title>
<META name=description content="Expert cat care advice for all cat owners. Find information on everything from bottle feeding strays to the best cat toys.">
<META name=keywords content="cat pet care,cat care advice,cat nutrition,kitten care,new cat owners,pet cats,pet kittens"><br>
</head>
Title
The title tag, often overlooked, is an extremely important part of optimization. The title of the page should not only describe the page but also contain your primary keyword. For example,
Body Text
The body text must contain keywords used in the tags as well as being excellent reading content. The primary keyword should be listed at least two or three times in the first paragraph. List it too many times, however, and the search engine may think you are spamming.
OTHER FACTORS AFFECTING RANKING
Domain Names - Domain names with included keywords tend to receive higher rankings.
Link Popularity - Many search engines use the number of links you have pointing at your site as a factor in determining ranking. The more links, the higher the rank.
Frames - Search engine spiders often have trouble indexing framed pages. For this reason, you should never use a frame on your home page. Use tables instead.
Free Domains - Because of the large number of sites on many free hosting services, search engines can receive an overwhelming number of submissions from the same root domain each day. Most search engines consider a large number of submissions from one domain in one day to be spam. Hence, it may take several times before your site submission is accepted.
SUBMISSION
There are several ways to submit your pages to a search engine. You can use a software program which can cost a few hundred dollars. The right software program can aid in optimization and tailor your submission for each search engine. Web Position Gold is an example of a software program that has received rave reviews.
Free submission on the web is also another way to go. Many sites will walk you through the submission and automatically send customized forms to several search engines at once. Two such web sites that provide this service are Selfpromotion.com and Submit It!
Many experienced submitters swear by manual submission. Manual submission requires you to visit each search engine and fill out an "Add URL" form. Although time consuming, rumor has it that manual submission gives you a slight edge. Despite this speculation it has yet to be determined.
Some sites actually require manual submission, such as Yahoo!. Yahoo! is one of the best sites to be listed on. Just make sure you follow their directions to the letter. They are very picky!
The above rules will not work magic, however, following them and providing the best possible content will give you a great competitive edge.
So where do Studyabroad.com and Gradschools.com rank? Below are rankings for a few major sites:
STUDYABROAD.COM:
AltaVista: 1
Excite: 1
HotBot: 1
GoTo.com: 2
InfoSeek: 1
GRADSCHOOLS.COM:
AltaVista: 3
Excite: 1
HotBot: 4
GoTo.com: 2
InfoSeek: 8
For more in-depth research on search engine optimization and submission, please see "Resources" below.
ABC SPAIN BCN in Barcelona
AFEL International
Alpha Sprachinstitut Austria
Ashland University
Association of Language Centers IALC
Baden-Powell Institute
BLS
Canadian as a Second Language Institute
Centro Internacional de Estudios (CIE)
CERGE - Charles University
College of Business and Communication
CollegesAbroad.com
Columbia University, Summer Ecosystem Abroad
Consortium of Universities for International Business Studies
Contiki Holidays
Diego Portales Language School
Dominican College
e-WorldPhone.com
Edith Cowan University
Exploring Languages and Cultures Abroad
Florida A&M University, Study Abroad
Glion Hotel School
Global Exchange Education Center
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Rothberg School for Overseas Students
Instituto Costarricense de Españolv
Instituto Guanacasteco de Idiomas
Language Courses Abroad, Ltd.
Language Liaison
LEAPNow: Lifelong Education Alternatives & Programs
London Institute
Maple Leaf Academy
Mayflower College of English, LTD.
North Park University
OSULA Education Center
Proyecto Linguistico Santa Maria
Queen's University School of English
Schiller International University
Southern Connecticut State University
Southside Virginia Community College
StudentUniverse.com
US/China Links
Vancouver English Center
Widener University - School of Law
Searchengineworld.com - In-depth information on optimizing and submitting to search engines. http://www.searchengineworld.com
Selfpromotion.com - Free auto submission tool, plus articles and optimization tools. http://www.selfpromotion.com
VIII. TRAFFIC REPORT **UNIQUE HOSTS BY MONTH
Here's a look at unique hosts (roughly the number of unique users) per month visiting studyabroad.com:
April 2000: 93,204
April 1999: 61,277
March 2000: 108,291
March 1999: 64,205
February 2000: 121,078
February 1999: 63,855
January 2000: 95,653
January 1999: 66,263
December 1999: 68,538
December 1998: 27,121
November 1999: 98,813
November 1998: 32,156
October 1999: 99,847
October 1998: 72,774
September 1999: 80,074
September 1998: 52,416
August 1999: 70,356
August 1998: 39,209
July 1999: 60,520
July 1998: 49,774
June 1999: 56,408
June 1998: 37,692
May 1999: 53,824
May 1998: 51,974
IX. TRAFFIC FACT OF THE MONTH Top Ten Countries Searched on Studyabroad.com
XIX. TOP TEN EDU Domains Here are the current top 10 EDU Domains visiting Studyabroad.com for the three month period ending on April 24, 2000. Following each school name you will find the number of pages viewed from that campus during the period.
(610) 364-0400
http://www.studyabroad.com
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