Luke at Reach Students has done a great job of breaking down the list into 21 websites that students like more than you do.

A tag cloud for Universities and the Web

Just discovered Tony Hirst’s excellent OUseful.Info blog, which yesterday had an exercise every site manager should try with their content. In Applying SEO to the Course Catalogue, Tony shows tag clouds comparing the text on a course description page with the search terms that are sending traffic to the site. I’d love to see the tag cloud of the search terms used by those who should have been our audience but never found us!

From the ‘About us’:

“This is an independent project that uses Google technology to explore the rankings of colleges and universities around the world. We are not Google employees and this project is not sponsored or endorsed by Google — it just uses the excellent Google search engine to shed light on the university rankings business. The site’s editor has more than ten years’ experience in higher education as a faculty member and administrator, and has visited and spoken at many colleges and universities in the United States and around the world.”

Their methods produce this list of the ‘Best UK Universities‘:

1. University of Cambridge
2. University of Oxford
3. University of Birmingham
4. University of Manchester
5. University of Leeds
6. Durham University
7. University of Edinburgh
8. University of Warwick
9. University College London
10. University of Southampton

Google has never been slow to push new ways to educate its users – there’s the Google Analytics Blog, the Conversion University and the User Forum.

And last week Google launched the Google Analytics YouTube Channel, with simple videos (several are 60 second videos), looking at topics including location targeting, finding the best keywords and interpreting and acting on your data.