We started with a quick overview of what Google says to concentrate on in your search rankings (do what’s best for your visitors) and how the W&M site search works. Now let’s move on to your actual web pages in Cascade, starting with the things you create first when you make a new page in Cascade.

Clear Site Hierarchy

Try to structure your website with the most important information “up front,” either linked from the homepage or very easily accessed from it. Using this kind of hierarchy in your site helps both users and search engines determine what is most important on your site.

Readable URLs

The System Name field in Cascade is pretty much always the first thing you set when creating new content and it is what forms the URL for your page. For your System Name try to be as descriptive as you can. Use dashes (-)  to separate words if you want a multi-word system name, for instance “meeting-minutes” rather than “meetingminutes.” Using a character like the dash or underscore to separate the words makes the URL easier for Google (and your users) to see what your page is about, a page like “www.wm.edu/folder1/folder2/index.php” is much harder to remember and figure out what the content is about than “www.wm.edu/about/history/index.php.” If there are key words in your page URL those will also be indexed in Google’s results, so this is one more spot where using meaningful names for your pages can help improve your search rankings.

Concise and Effective Page Titles

Each page in your site should have a short but unique title that clearly indicates to both Google, and the person viewing your site (either in search results or actually on the page) what the page is about and how it differs from other pages on your site.

In Cascade the page title is specified in the “Title” field of the Inline Metadata section of your page. This title will be what appears at the top of your page as an H1 tag as well as what shows up in the title of a search result and in your browser’s title bar.

Metatags (where needed)

Years ago the keywords metatag was a factor in search engine results but in recent years Google has begun ignoring the keywords field, mainly because sites were “stuffing” the keywords field to bump up their search results rather than putting in the most relevant keywords for their site. So this is not something you’ll need to worry about for your page.

A page’s description metatag gives Google and other search engines a summary of what the page is about. Although these do not directly influence the search results any longer, they are still important as search engines may use them as descriptive snippets for your page if it turns up in their results. Something to note, if the search engine finds text it deems more relevant to the user’s search, such as a sentence containing their search term, then that may be used as the summary for the search result instead of what’s in your description metatag.

As with page titles, the description for each page should be unique and specific to each page. If you copied the same description from page to page, how will users be able to distinguish which of your pages they want to visit when they come up in a search result? If all of the results from your site appear the same the user may skip your site altogether since it is unclear.

To set your description metatag in Cascade, fill in the “Summary” field of the Inline Metadata section of your page.

In the next post we’ll look at how the main content of your page affects your search rankings, with tips on how to improve those rankings using your images, headings and general content.

~Tiffany Broadbent

There is no magic bullet for getting your site ranked highly in Google’s (or any other search engine’s) search results. However, there are a handful of best practices that can help you make your pages more relevant to users and thus more likely to become top-ranked results in Google, this is referred to as SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

First, a starting thought from Google’s SEO Starter Guide (emphasis mine):

You should base your optimization decisions first and foremost on what’s best for the visitors of your site. They’re the main consumers of your content and are using search engines to find your work…Search engine optimization is about putting your site’s best foot forward when it comes to visibility in search engines, but your ultimate consumers are your users, not search engines.

Search results on wm.edu

On the W&M website we use a Google Custom Search Engine which, when you boil it down, is just Google’s normal search engine except its results are restricted to only look on William & Mary’s sites (anything ending in “wm.edu”) and schools (education.wm.edu, law.wm.edu, mason.wm.edu, vims.edu and www.wm.edu). So all of the following tips from Google’s SEO Starter Guide will apply just as well to your W&M search results as to Google’s (although they may not match exactly).

In the next two posts we will work from the top down on a webpage, from page URLs to image descriptions, exploring how each element affects search results — stay tuned…

~Tiffany Broadbent