Signal Boost: Promoting Your Event Online

Want to get the word out about your concert, presentation, or workshop? The Office of Communications can help by promoting it through channels like the university event calendar, Puget Sound social media pages, the reader board on Union Ave., and campus e-newsletter Open Line.

To share your event with the Office of Communications, visit pugetsound.edu/events and select ‘Submit an Event’ on the right side of the page to open a submission form.

When using the form, here are a few tips to keep in mind:

  • Include a detailed description of your event, including a start and end time.
  • An external website, such as a Facebook event page, is good to include if you have it. This can be entered in the “website” field.
  • Adding an image is a great way to get your event noticed. Images without text are preferred; small text might not be readable. If you have a photo of the speaker/artist, that’s perfect.
  • At the end of the form, you can select multiple tags related to your event. For example, Night at the Museum could be tagged “Slater Museum,” “Parent/Family,” “Public,” and “Science.” This would help community members find the event when searching by any of those categories.

And that’s it! Once you hit Submit, we’ll take it from there. If you have changes to an event, or questions about promotion, contact events@pugetsound.edu.

Note: The Union Ave. reader board is reserved for events that are open to the public. If you’d like your event to be visible to people passing by Union Ave., be sure to tag it as “Public.”

Looking for other types of promotion?
The Office of Communications also designs printed materials like posters, fliers, mailers, and invitations. If you have a budget for printing, and want to get started on promotion several weeks before your event, let us know at pugetsound.edu/communicationsrequest.

We look forward to hearing from you!

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Michaela Alden '13Michaela Alden ’13
Production Specialist
253.879.3582
Michaela manages the university event calendar and is the central contact for campus lecture series, performances, guest artists, and more.

Do keywords matter in search?

Yes. And no.

If by “search” you really mean Google, mostly no.

Want to know a secret? There’s no one single thing you can do to shoot to the top of public search results. Google’s algorithm to determine what goes into their search results where has approximately 200 factors in it. And they update that algorithm in the neighborhood of 500 times a year.

Meta Keywords & Google Search Products
In the old days of the Web (yes, I still remember those), meta keywords were the main way of controlling if and how your page was indexed by search engines. And very quickly, as people learned to abuse meta keywords, they became obsolete. Google hasn’t used them in their search algorithm for years, and the odds are slim that they will change that policy.

While this is true for the public Google search we all know and love, Google does have custom search products, and meta keywords ARE used by some of those products. We currently use a custom Google search tool for our internal searches, so it is possible that meta keywords may influence our internal university website search.

Therefore, I tell people that adding meta keywords certainly can’t hurt. It might help in some ways, but it may not.

What about the Meta Description?
Well, now, the meta description is a whole separate matter. Google does sometimes use the meta description as the text describing a site in their search results list.

Use content keywords instead
Meta keywords (found on the SEO tab in our current CMS) may not be used by public Google, but that doesn’t mean search doesn’t care about keywords. It does. It cares about content keywords. These are words and phrases you use in your page content, headers, titles, and meta description. And Google and other search engines DO care about these indicators of the content topics on your page.

So what CAN I do?
Write good content. Make meaningful page, subhead, and link titles (no “click here” links!). Update your content frequently. Don’t worry so much about how to trick Google into rating your page higher so much as making sure the content is useful and meaningful for the users who DO find your page.

RESOURCES

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Barbara WeistBarbara Weist
Web Specialist
253.879.2691
Barb is the strategic mind behind Puget Sound’s website. She produces webpages, content, and usability features; manages our content management system; and provides web tools, templates, and training.