You’re probably familiar with the word “internet”, but you may not have heard of the word “intranet”. An intranet is when a particular community has websites geared toward that particular community. They generally have their own search engine so they can find their sites. A large company may have many websites for many departments but may have a company search engine that employees may use. Same thing for universities. There may be many sites for all the different departments. Those in the university community will use a university specific search engine to find information rather than a large search engine such as Google.
Does SEO matter in an intranet? Yes! There’s less competition and its easier to rank. However, its possible that, for instance, a news article could outrank the department. If someone is looking for the department, they might have to sift through news articles! SEO does matter in an intranet, so make sure your intranet site is optimized.
Does an intranet site need to compete with Google? In some cases, no. In others, intranet sites may be geared to the outside world. They might have ads that try to attract people to their department site. These kind of sites need to compete in the internet search engines. Those with intranet sites may sometimes forget that SEO does matter.
If you do have a site like this, think about your audience. Is your audience solely people in your community or do you want outside visitors? If you want outside visitors, its important you do SEO so you are ranked outside of your intranet.
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