Note: For those students looking for Alcohol Edu, please login to the portal and go to the Records, Registration, & Finances tab. There will be a link to Alcohol Edu on the right. The reason that it is in the portal is that the portal provides a single sign-on to the service so that you don’t have to fill in most of your information again.
Recently ‘AlcoholEdu’ and ‘Alcohol Edu’ came up in our popular searches. It’s not surprising as most of the communication for this program is via paper that is mailed to students. I know that when I was a student, paper mail got lost after I got it. A lot. I imagine things haven’t changed much since then.
Without much information about the program on our web site, searches are turning up mostly irrelevant information. The first thing we recommend is to create a page with all the information that people would need about this program (times, dates, links, etc.) and link it prominently from the department main page. The title of the created page should also be specific (“AlcoholEdu Information”) and make good use of header tags (h1) to convey to the search engines the purpose of those pages.
If people are searching for your information that doesn’t necessarily mean that you or your organization have failed in your organizational scheme. The age of search is upon us. I suspect the number of people that try to find things via navigation is dwindling, while the number who first try search are growing. There is a good chance that people aren’t even going to your site before they do a search. You need to make sure your site works for the searchers.