Sclipo provides the most SEO-friendly Online Campus

Teachers who use a Sclipo Online Campus will attract more new students than those with a traditional LMS (Learning Management System). Firstly, the Sclipo platform has a better page rank and more traffic than most LMS installations. Second, and more importantly, search engines can find the content of a Sclipo Campus easier than that of an LMS. Easier, or in fact, they can find it at all.

LMS are closed systems for current students
LMS were created to help Universities and large institutions teach their current students. Only after a person becomes a student, s/he gets access to the online campus. To attract new students is not the objective. This is the job of the marketing department, who may use other online tools such as a promotional web site, SEO, SEM and classifieds. People who are not students can not go beyond the log in page of the online campus. Neither can Google. This may be ok for a large institution, but what about an independent teacher or a continuing education firm without a large marketing budget?

A Sclipo Campus is open to any visitor (and search engine), helping to attract new students
Anybody can find and explore a Sclipo Campus – people and search engines – which makes it SEO-friendly (Search-Engine-Optimized). This means, all content (courses, documents, videos, members, etc.) on a Sclipo Campus is indexed by search engines. So, Google et. al. can store hundreds of links pointing to the Sclipo Online Campus, one for each content item. The more content, the more links and the easier the Campus will be found by people looking for education. Hence, the probability that prospective new students will find your courses increases with every content you add to your Sclipo Online Campus. (Access to view content can, of course, be restricted.) In addition to being SEO-friendly, a Sclipo Online Campus provides features to help you promote your school, such as a Campus classifieds. In a traditional LMS, content inside the Online Campus is not stored by search engines. Potential students will have a harder time to find your school.

Example of the SEO-friendliness of a Sclipo Online Campus
Say you are a school offering language courses for adults. You may have a website in which you present your school. If you get a traditional LMS, such as Moodle, you may add a link from your web to your online campus. Visitors can only view its front page. Entering requires a login. Only students can access your Campus. Search engines do not know what is behind the front page. People searching for say “TOEFL” or “Italian course” will probably not find you on a search engine.

If however you use Sclipo, visitors can explore your Online Campus beyond its home page: they can browse the courses you offer, the videos and documents of your library as well as your live sessions. They can see which events and groups you have organized. They can even see teachers and students. All this generates trust about your school. Visitors can participate in courses and view content you have set as “free” and “open”, but not those set as “restricted”. Search engines know what is offered in your Campus, so prospective students can find it easily. For example, if you added 20 tutorials related to the TOEFL test, search engines will have 20 high value links pointing to your school. This means, people searching for “TOEFL” can find you easier. Announcing your TOEFL courses only on your Campus front page just generates one link. And this one will not be ranked as high as the ones to TOELF tutorials. Search engines rank educational content better than promotional text. And every time you add a new content, its description and link is stored. So, every new content becomes automatically advertising for your school. The more content, the more visitors you will get from search engines; the more visitors, the more new students. To further boost the potential to convert visitors to students, you can leave some content open. Now people can view a free sample to better appreciate the quality of your school. And, visitors and students can link to that video or document, embed it, post it on Facebook, tweet about it, etc.. Now, both your visitors and students become your promoters. This is called viral marketing – which will be the topic of a future post.