Earlier this week I talked a bit about the role that student newspapers play in this blog, and about the inadvertent barriers they often put up to building a readership beyond their home campus — the ways in which they make miss opportunities for bloggers to write about them and link to their stuff. Today I’m going to offer five tips for student papers that are looking to raise their online profile, and expand their national readership, without a lot of ongoing effort.

1 | Identify yourself.

It’s startling how often student newspapers’ websites fail to identify the school they serve. If I’ve reached an article on your site through a Google search, I don’t necessarily know what campus I’m reading about, and that’s data I need to have if I’m going to write about your piece. So tell me. In the header, in the footer, somewhere. Preferably somewhere that’s visible from every page of your site. And if the name of your school doesn’t include the name of the state it’s in, tell me that too. (Putting your newspaper’s full name and mailing address in the footer of every page, like the Ball State Daily News does, is a clean and concise way of handling this.)

2 | Really identify yourself.

Having the name and location of your institution at my fingertips is a big help if I’m writing something up on the fly, or Tweeting a link from the road. But if I’m doing a bigger piece, I’m going to want more information. Give me an “About Us” page with basic facts about your paper (is it a daily? a weekly? is it independent, or official? how long has it been around? how can I reach you?) and your school (public? private? how big? what kind of an institution?), and I’m a happy blogger.

3 | Get me up to speed.

I know that student papers traditionally assume a certain familiarity with the campus, as they should. I wouldn’t want you to spend the first half of your story spoon-feeding me information that every one of your regular readers already possesses. But a lot of the time when I’m reading, I get the strong impression that there’s background being assumed that many local students lack. If I’m completely lost, it’s likely that some of your readers in the dining halls are also confused — if you give them what they need, I’ll probably have most of what I need too.

4 | Link me up.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a student newspaper use links effectively to orient their readers in their ongoing coverage of a story, and it’s a shame — particularly since many student papers have clunky internal search engines. If you’re hitting a story hard, particularly a story that’s getting some buzz beyond the campus, link to your previous stories in every new piece you write.

5 | Tweet me.

I follow more than seven hundred Twitter feeds, but only a handful of student newspapers. There are a lot of great student media Twitter feeds out there, but most of them are way too high-volume and broad-focus for someone like me to keep up with. That’s as it should be, of course — a student paper’s Twitter feed should be pitched to the students of that campus — but the thoughtful use of hashtags, Twitter lists, and dedicated accounts can turn a student paper into a must-read online source on a breaking story.

There you go — my top five suggestions for student newspapers looking to build their profile among bloggers like me and readers like mine. If you’ve got other ideas, post them in comments.