In a final note for the year, and filed under the heading of either “shameless promotion” or “achievements” - whichever you prefer - is this word about our new RSS page that represents a compilation of feeds that have existed for a while now across the Peterson’s sphere. The feeds represent a running snapshot of daily updates provided electronically by thousands of traditional and online colleges and graduate programs who partner with us for recruiting services. We’ve started linking into this page from some key portals such as the brick-and-mortar college search, online college search and graduate search, and it will soon be accessible from nearly all pages on Petersons.com. These are in addition to the thousand-plus direct feeds from institutions submitted by you and found in our college and university feed directory.

Herewith, the final tip in this short series on optimizing your WordPress blog for search engines - to be continued….

Tip 3 - Head Meta Description

Some search engines - Google included - tend to use the HTML meta description value on your page as the basis for the summary text in an entry on a result page. If you don’t have a value for the meta description tag, just about anything goes.

The Head META Description plugin will automatically take the first n-number of words from your blog post or page, and dynamically create a meta description value for you, resulting in a nice, cleanly formatted intro to the post. It can mean the difference between random gobbly-gook and clean, readable text.

This plugin allows you to set the number of words that will be pulled into the description. I tend to leave it at the default of 20 words.

Remember that the quicker a reader can ascertain the contents of a page in a search engine listing, the better they’ll be able to determine whether the content is what they’re seeking or not. Not only that, but if you don’t use a plugin like this, the descriptions of your blog post and page entries in search engines may all begin with the same string of characters, which increases the risk that it will be treated as “similar” content and not necessarily offered to as many searchers as you’d like to think.

Disclaimer

If you are using a Wordpress.com hosted blog (rather than an installed version of the stand-alone open source software), I can’t tell you whether you can use any of these features in this series. But last time I checked, it didn’t support external plugins, so tips 2 and 3 might not be available to you.

I reported earlier about the cool and content-rich Babson feed, and how I wished the images came through the feed into my Sage reader. Well I’m happy to report they’re now flowing through. (See image below - this is what the feed looks like in my Sage reader for Firefox.) Perhaps Dimitri’s comments helped?

Among feeds added recently to the College and University Feed Directory is one from Babson College’s New Blog. It’s a FeedBurner feed. Something I noticed is that they have a a photo or two with each entry - very cool. Unfortunately the photos don’t come through to my feed reader. Bummer! (I suspect it would come through if they fully qualified the link in the IMG tag instead of using a relative link - in my RSS reader the relativity is lost.) In the first image below is what an item ends up looking like in my reader (Sage for Firefox) - with the image showing as undefined. Below that is an image of what an item looks like when when an image is present in a feed, through in the Sage reader for Firefox. (Looks like Dimitri has some new hardware!)

So the question is: Do you include images in your RSS feeds? Why or why not?

Click on the image below to play video (Quicktime, 18MB, 2:04).

Matthew Winkel from The College of New Jersey wore a number of different hats at this year’s EduWeb conference. He was making podcasts, filling in for presenters, and hosting his own sessions. I was lucky to get a few minutes with him. I asked him what’s going with RSS at TCNJ, and how the College is planning to roll out podcasting. They’re toying with the idea of doing a podcast interview series with professors and others on campus.

Matthew was a participant in this year’s HigherEd BlogCon, where he presented on Student To-Do List RSS feeds.

Note: I tried to present this video to you through YouTube, but the audio wasn’t properly sync’d in the Flash movie. If anyone knows why this happens, please let me know!

- Lenoir-Rhyne College has an RSS news feed

- University of Ulster has a podcast page and RSS feed. The podcast covers “the life and work of the University, its staff, students, partners and visitors.”

- Society for New Communications Research today announced an awards program for excellence in the use of new communications models and solutions. There is a category for an academic award. Why not consider nominating a project you think is particularly outstanding or innovative? (Disclosure: I’m a Research Fellow with the Society.)

University of Oregon has RSS feeds for news and events linked from their home page.

Many of you regularly read Karine Joly’s Collegewebeditor blog, but for those of you who don’t, you might want to check out a whole bunch of interviews she’s posting with people from around higher education who are using RSS–including Jill Brinton, David Jarmul, and Erik Poole.

Check out these recent articles on RSS in Higher Education from the recent HigherEd BlogCon.

Using RSS to increase user awareness of e-resources in academic libraries (Jay Bhatt, Drexel University)

Building a Wall of Books (Edward Vielmetti, University of Michigan School of Information)

Student To-Do List RSS Feed: Combining Audience and Task Navigation (Matthew Winkel, The College of New Jersey)

Each time I check back, Johns Hopkins seems to have expanded their RSS offerings. The Bloomberg School of Public Health has a bunch of text, audio, and video feeds, and Medicine has a weekly news roundup podcast. Last I checked, they were all available through iTunes. What a great way to promote the school’s expertise. I’m going to use them as an example next month at GMAC annual conference where I’m on a podcast panel. There just aren’t a lot of business schools doing podcasts. I know that Drexel is talking about launching one. Right now Drexel is pumping alumni news through RSS, but so far nothing on the admissions side.

By the way, iTunes also has a “Listeners also subscribed to” feature, and you can see that Hopkins podcasts are right in the mix with shows that originate somewhere other than an institution.