Please note: This document is designed to help optimize your Cascade website. Also, please keep in mind that the changes you make to your site won’t immediately be reflected on Google; in fact, it might take up to a week for them to pick up on your changes.
There are two key methods to help ensure your site ranks in Google searches:It is a good practice when building your website in Cascade to edit the meta information. To do this, fill in the following metadata under the edit tab for each page of your website as referenced by Hannon Hill.
Display Name - This will be displayed in the side navigations and in the breadcrumbs and is different than the system name (i.e. News & Publications, Alumni Publications)
Summary - A short synopsis of the page
Teaser - A short and punchy sentence/phrase about the page
Keywords - Keywords should reflect the main content on your website. Keep your keywords as “solid” as possible by thinking about what users might use to find your website. They should be separated with commas or else they will be treated as one term “keyphrases” (i.e.: “earth studies” versus “earth, studies”).
The World Wide Web Consortium (WC3) recommends commas in HTML 4.01 specification:
Some indexing engines look for META elements that define a comma‐separated list of keywords/phrases, or that give a short description. Search engines may present these keywords as the result of a search. The value of the name attribute sought by a search engine is not defined by this specification.
Consider the example: <META name="keywords" content="vacation,Greece,sunshine"
Description - Displayed below website titles in search engines and are useful when searching for a website. Try to limit your description to one professional‐sounding sentence of no more than 20 words (at most
Author - Make the author of the site your department name (i.e. Department of Chemistry). Do not use any one person’s name.
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HTML ‐ TITLE
Edit your code and give your page a good title (you’ll find the text you’ll need to change between the <title> and </title> tags). Make sure you create a meaningful page title that reflects your faculty and some keywords about your content. For example:
HTML – H1, etc.
One of the most important things you can do is use HTML tags in the way they were intended. Google seems to like content and titles within heading tags (<h1>, <h2>, etc.).
Your in‐page titles should be within H1 tags and be as on‐topic as possible. Titles like, “Welcome to our website!” do nothing (think about how many other sites are on the Internet saying the same thing).
Titles like “The Biology Graduate Advantage at Western” might be more on topic and relevant to an actual search a user might carry out.
(top)One of the most important parts of ensuring that you place well in a search engine like Google is writing good, relevant copy.
Content related to keywords
The general rule when writing copy is to write in as many keyword‐friendly terms as you can without spamming (repeating the same keywords many times with no real information being provided). While being keyword‐rich, it’s also important to be concise and on‐topic. A viable paragraph might look like this:
In the end, regardless of your code and content, the most important thing you can do is have relevant, informative, and useful content and tools.
Best Practices for Content© 1878 - 2013 Western University
