Some Guidelines for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for UNE Web Pages
Contents
Why you should care about SEO for your UNE page
Content for the web needs to have its own style, and be "search engine friendly". Online writing style is addressed in Guidelines for Content Writers. The objective of this set of guidelines is to help avoid common errors and make it easy for the information you publish to be "search engine friendly".
The first thing to consider when writing web pages is to remember that all search engines ignore the presentation of your page. Search engines simply look at the logical document structure (ie the page’s semantic structure: correct markup of headings, subheadings, lists, etc) and try to make sense of it for the purposes of others (human or machine) who might seek it.
Your document structure as a machine sees it
Your document/web page almost certainly has headings, paragraphs and sub-headings. But have you thought of the other ways your document may be viewed? Other things to consider include file name, document title, description, document anchors (for incoming links), keywords and much more. Why, you ask? Your page can be linked to, displayed in other lists, shown as a bookmark, linked to in another page reference etc.
For example, let’s imagine a page about search engine optimisation (SEO). It probably has a major heading like "Some Guidelines for Search Engine Optimisation" and other normal document structure. There are different weights when it comes to evaluating the relevance of each item. So, document titles have more weight than headings, top level headings have more weight than lower headings and so on. This means you have to think about these pieces of meta information regarding your document. For example, many search engines ignore your top-level heading when displaying your page in results. Instead it uses document title. Interestingly, many of the same search engines ignore the description field when displaying your page among results and instead display the text around the search terms used.
HTML document title, search engines and result-listings
The top heading of this document is "Some Guidelines for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for UNE web pages". This example actually makes a decent page title because it mentions UNE, its purpose and subject. It also contains many key words that are relevant and really doesn’t require the normal "UNE – …" before page titles, as is normally the case for UNE web pages, although the duplication certainly wouldn't hurt things in this example. Generally though, you want to keep the page titles readable, relevant (even when taken out-of-context, eg. among search results), and have as many key-words while not being too bloated. Poor examples are the many pages in online search results that have the titles like "About Us" and "Store", which give no real information, and "Untitled", which shows that no 'title' meta data was used.
Your document title is how you appear in search results. A good title won’t make someone follow your link but a poor title will deter people who might otherwise follow it. The title is also used by most browsers as the name for the bookmark when you bookmark a page or add it to your favourites.
Headings, semantic structure and incoming links
Your document should contain at least one top-level or heading level 1. Convention is to have one top-level heading per page as this effectively labels this resource. When a page is created in the UNEweb CMS, a page title is required. This creates the level 1 heading for the page. For all other headings you should always consider adding incoming anchors (identified points within a page) for people who might want to link directly to an item on your page – this helps because incoming links help your search engine ranking, and because items that are easy to link to are more likely to be linked back. For more detail on making anchors see http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/links.html.
Filenames and URIs (Uniform Resource Identifier)
The filename is often overlooked. A common mistake is to carefully consider your title, headings and content, only to end up naming your file "sgfu-july2007.html". It’s much better to name it "seo-guidelines-for-une-2007-07-30.html". The key is to be consistent and keep the filename readable. Always think about your folder structure or URI too (eg. /images/my-great-pic.jpg). If you’re adding a new file for people to download and previously you put it in the "/downloads" folder it helps users and search engines if web publishers try to be consistent. Additionally, the filename has more weight with the search engines than body-text. Choice of filenames is also discussed in "File and Folder Names".
The document content
Carefully choose the text you select for links, always include semantic markup for acronyms and abbreviations (eg ABBR and ACRONYM tags with title attributes), never use 'click here' or similar non-descriptive words as links. Instead, make meaningful words links: "Download our course brochure for Rural Medicine". If you want people to find your page, make it readable and interesting. If you want people to link to it, make sure they can link directly to the part that interests them. If you have a related resource, name it appropriately, and always make it clear if the link to a related resource will take a user offsite.
Meta tags and other information
Meta information is largely misunderstood. This is because it is used for a variety of purposes; operational, search engine keywords, expiry dates for removal, review dates for updating. Meta data is discussed in the Meta Data Guidelines titled, What is Meta Data? For SEO the most relevant ones are title, description and keywords. Once again, keep it simple and readable. It is also good to add relevant search terms to the keyword meta data. For example, if you have a map of Armidale on a web page, you may wish to include the keyword ‘directions’ if it doesn’t appear on the page, especially if it would help someone seeking directions around Armidale. Key word meta-information can be used to add American spellings for search purposes, ie words that don’t appear on the page but are nevertheless relevant.
Incoming links as ranking referees
Every link to your site is like a vote for your site’s relevance. It’s beyond the scope of this document to outline ways to achieve this, but there are simple things you can do. Do not move your URIs and redirect them if you do, encourage other sites to link to your site, identify old, broken incoming links and get the referrer to correct it or add a redirect. Also, if you link to others’ sites, encourages them to return the favour.