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School of Computing

Help users to find your web pages

publishing guidelines

A user wishing to find relevant material on the web will either type keywords into a search engine or browse likely areas of the web. To increase the likelihood of that user finding your published material, you need both to ensure that the document is well represented in a number of popular search engines and to improve the available navigation paths to it.

Tips on getting the best out of search engines

Search engines typically visit a web site and crawl (follow links to other web pages) through the web site's pages obtaining details about the content of each page. External search engines, such as Google and Altavista, vary in how deep they traverse a web site's file structure hence it is advisable to put more effort into getting higher level web pages listed. Internal search engines, such as HtDig which is used by the Computer Science web site, can be configured to index all web pages.

There are a number of simple things you can do to improve the chances of a user finding a particular web page.

1. Title tag:   <title>....</title>
   Always include a <title> tag and associated title string which should be a brief sentence describing the web page clearly with important keywords. This sentence is used as the bookmark text as well as being displayed by the search engine.
   <title>Industrial placements </title>
   Some build scripts insert the <title> tag and accompanying title string automatically, for example bmp, includes the course code in the title string. However, if you create your own template then you need to specify the title string to be used.
   
   
2. Heading tag:   <h1>...</h1>
   Words included in the first heading are typically more highly ranked than those in subsequent headings. Words in higher-level headings e.g. <h1> are more significant than those found in lower-level headings e.g. <h3>. Words in headings are typically more significant than those in paragraphs.
   
   
3. First Paragraph:   <p> ..... </p>
   The text of the first paragraph is scanned for keywords. Ideally, this should be a description of what the page contains, and should include as many keywords as possible.
   
   
4. Consistent and clear terminology:
   Use the same keywords and phrases throughout rather than trying to change them. Repeated words often rank more highly. Use the target user language and avoid jargon where possible.
   
   
5. Adequately describe non-web documents:
   PDF and Word documents are not typically scanned by search engines and hence are not included in their listings. To compensate for this, you should provide a textual description on a separate web page with a link to the document. This text will be processed.
   
   
6. Provide metadata:
   See below
   
   
7. Summary:
   Include the most significant information at the top of the page. This will enable a user to quickly determine whether the content of the rest of the web page is relevant to them.

Metadata

Web page ranking may also be improved by including metadata within the header of the web page. Metadata is information about the document such as description, keywords, author and date published. Metadata is not displayed by the browser but it is contained in the header of the document. Many search engines will process this information though the effect on web page ranking differs between search engines. There are various metadata schemes available but the most widely used is the one provided in the HTML standard. The two most commonly used elements of this scheme are description and keywords e.g..

<meta name="description" content="Brief description, typically a short paragraph">
<meta name="keywords" content="list of comma-separated keywords " >

Metadata may be added to web pages built using CSWeb build scripts. Place relevant metatags similar to the ones above into a file named with the same prefix as your content web page but with the suffix .meta. The build script will then incorporate this metadata into the web page. For example, if you want to add metadata to your business card , then place appropriate metadata into a file called index.meta and rebuild the web page using the bp build script. For example, Maggie Bowman might include the following in her index.meta file:

<meta name="description" content="Maggie Bowman is the Information Systems Administrator for the Computer Science department at the University of Kent. This includes being the webmaster, maintaining the computer science web site for students and staff spanning the Canterbury and Medway sites, developing new web-based services and providing an help desk facility by email.">

<meta name="keywords" content="webmaster, web, computer science, administrator, cs-webmaster, help desk">

Additional Advice

There is also a top 5 search tips available.