SEO for Department of Information and Computer Science

[Derf]

Hey guys... You all know I am a newbie when it comes to this stuff... I am a marketing major with Information Systems background. So I have been asked to help out the IST deparment with SEO of there home page.

the site is here:

http://www.radford.edu/~cist/

To be honest it is horriable. No Meta Tags or anything like that

What all do you suggest I do?

I was going to work mostly on the links, and the meta tags approach... Anyone else have any ideas. And if my ideas are totaly off base let me know.

Thanks everyone

[compar]

I didn't look at the page. But Links are good and Meta tags are of no value to Google.

However some people include the title when they say meta tags -- technically the title is not a meta tag -- but the title is probably the single most important on page item.

[sem4u]

I would re-do all of the images with text on the first page as plain text. Search engines can't read images properly.

[scisoft]

Well I am far from being SEO guru, but we have designed similar sites.
The good news - it is often possible to get good GPR links to academic and education sites (but it takes time). Find similar institutions, use alltheweb.com to find who is linking to them ... and ask these to link to you as well.
Also, the main page is full of scripts. I think you should consider moving these scripts into external files.
As for the meta - at least the description tag is worthy to use.
And now the menu. It is nice, but it distributes GPR evenly over all pages.
Some of them (e.g. Contact) are completely useless for SEO. Perhaps you may try to keep the number of pages in the menu as low as possible and redesign the links to channel GPR to several selected pages.

Hope it helps.

[Derf]

Thanks for the info people. I just learned that the department didn't even make this website. Not sure why they didn't it was done by the PR department who just did it really quick. I am going to have to submit everything I do for them in writing and probably will not be the one that gets to do the coding. I hope I get to though. That would be great.

Thanks everyone

[Emancipator]

Before I did anything I would fix the 58 code errors on the site. I found them in less then a minute so your webdev can do the same. I always preach the compatibility point. Hope my feedback helps. Fix your code, then worry about seo