Hello everyone. I hope your holidays have been as enjoyable as mine - as great as working for KMi is, a little vacation is never a bad thing :-)

Anyhow, onto the eLMS talk! Today's post is less about actual LMS management and more about LMS SEO - search engine optimization. Recently, MedlineUniversity.com decided to include Google Analytics as part of their site management/marketing strategy. The intention here, is to learn about the habits of our users; and to learn how our users are finding us.

Because MedlineUniversity.com allows anyone to setup an account for free, the user base we see on this eLMS implementation provides a wonderfully, unbiased, cross section of eLMS users. We have users across almost every state and even from multiple countries. The job descriptions of the users, while mostly nursing oriented, includes everything from sales to C-level. 

The hope, is that by including Google Analytics, we can increase the visibility of our LMS learning system and also increase the usability of the application for end users. Using certain search engine optimization techniques (both externally and internally to the eLearning application), the intention is to make MedlineUniversity.com more accessible and appear higher in Google search results.

This, in turn, will drive more users to the site and thus allows the folks at MedlineUniversity.com more opportunities for their marketing efforts. 



Anecdotally, the application seems to get many more visitors coming from referring sites rather than from organic keyword searches. This, I think is one area where external page optimization the best solution.

There are two types of SEO. Internal. And external. Internal SEO practices include adding meta-tags, such as author information and content descriptions. External SEO is a matter of increasing the number of external links to a page. Specifically, when an external link is created, Google will register that link and (more importantly) will register the textused in that link. Based on the text to which the link is attached, Google then starts to get an idea of the keywords related to end site (in this case, eLMS).

For example, Google will eventually crawl this blog post, just like it does for other pages on the internet. When it crawls this page, it will see this link:

Free CEUs available at Medline University!

Not only will Google see this link, it will also see the text (Free CEUs...) associated with this link. At which point, Google knows that whatever this link it to, it has to do with Free CEUs. Once enough well formatted links (with the phrase "CEU" in the text) build up and are found by Google, MedlineUniversity.com will begin appearing higher in any Google search having to do with CEUs!

As more and more eLearning companies begin to refine the SEO process, KMi and its clients will work hard to ensure we stay ahead of the SEO curve.