EPET needs you! (Link to our site)
In the current higher education climate, the Educational Psychology and Educational Technology (EPET) PhD program has to do a lot better and recruiting more high quality students. Two efforts currently underway to help achieve these goals is to make our website both more useable and more visible. Our first priority in this effort, for now, is to make our site more visible. If current and prospective students can’t find our site, it isn’t very useful to us.
That’s why I’m writing *you*. We need *your* help!
Not too long ago, the college redid all the webpages for the CEPSE department. In the process, our website not only changed content, look, and feel, but also it changed locations. Currently, google isn’t really able to find our new site and our new location. Anyone looking for educational psychology or educational technology programs using some sort of internet search isn’t very likely to find us.
And here is where you come in. We need you to link to our site if you have a webpage, administer a website, or are thinking of making a website. We need you to do it in particular ways as well, so that we are consistent, and that google will pick up the right keywords associated with our site.
NAME OF THE PROGRAM: When referring to our PhD program, please call it by its full name, “Educational Psychology and Educational Technology”. If you’re still using the old name (Learning Technology & Culture, or LTC), please change it. Also, please don’t use the abbreviation “EPET”, unless you’ve used (and linked) the full name at least once.
WHERE TO LINK TO: Use the following address only please. Please remove links to any old site. Please do not link to specific pages within the site. Use the following, and only the following: http://www.educ.msu.edu/cepse/epet
HOW TO OUR PAGE WITH TEXT: Every time you use the words “Educational Technology and Educational Psychology”, we would like you to make that text *TWO* links to our site. We want the Words “Educational Psychology and” to be one link, and the words “Educational Psychology” to also be a link. Both should link to our new site: http://www.educ.msu.edu/cepse/epet
Why? We want google to associate our site with searches for “Educational Technology” as well as “Educational Psychology”. Making only one link for the whole phrase would be better only in the unlikely event that people search for joint programs like “Educational Psychology and Educational Technology”
The HTML you can use to do this is as follows:
----- copy/paste between the dashed lines ---------------
<a href="http://www.educ.msu.edu/cepse/epet/">Educational Psychology and</a><a href="http://www.educ.msu.edu/cepse/epet/"> Educational Technology</a>
---- cut copy/paste --------------
HOW TO LINK TO OUR SITE WITH BADGES (IMAGES)
Badges are re becoming all the rage for showing affiliations and membership. So, we have EPET badges as well. They aren’t the best (I’m no graphic artist), but feel free to use them if you like. Below is the code to use to include each of two badges on your webpage.
----- copy/paste between the dashed lines for "Ed Tech" version of the badge ------
<a href="http://www.educ.msu.edu/cepse/epet/"><img src="http://www.educ.msu.edu/cepse/epet/images/badges/badge_tech.gif" alt="Educational Psychology at MSU"/></a>
----- end copy/paste --------
----- copy/paste between the dashed lines for "Ed Tech" version of the badge ------
<a href="http://www.educ.msu.edu/cepse/epet/"><img src="http://www.educ.msu.edu/cepse/epet/images/badges/badge_edpsych.gif" alt="Educational Psychology at MSU"/></a>
----- end copy/paste --------
WILL THIS WORK? Short answer is yes. More links to a site greatly influence how google ranks pages. In the last couple of weeks, we’ve gone from completely not listed at all in google, to being somewhere on the 8th page of results. That was with just a few key people linking to our new site. Many more links will help us return to the first page of google results, and with your help, we can do it!
PROMOTING OUR PROGRAM TO OTHERS: Please be sure to mention our program, and to recruit students anywhere you come in contact with them. You can simply tell anyone remotely interested in a degree to check out EdTechPHD.com and/or EdPsychPHD.com. Please don’t make hyperlinks with these addresses (use the schemes presented above), but they work to get others to our site, because these addresses are a lot more memorable.
If you’re giving a talk at a conference, the last slide can be used to make some acknowledgements, and perhaps include one of the two badges above, with a short mention of “If you’re interested in a PhD in Educational Psychology or Educational Technology” from MSU, please visit EdPsychPHD.com (or use EdTechPHD.com if you’re at an edtech conference).
Thank you for your help! Sincerely,
Dr. Matthew J. Koehler
509 Erickson Hall
Educational Psychology & Educational Technology
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824
517.353.9287
http://mkoehler.educ.msu.edu
