Searchability
Let's talk search engine optimization (SEO).
The W&M Search is powered by Google. It uses Google's standard search engine with results restricted to only look on William & Mary's sites — anything ending in "wm.edu". While there is no magic bullet for getting your site ranked highly in search results, there are best practices that can make your pages more relevant to users and thus more likely to rank highly with Google and other search engines.
Let's work through the main elements of a Cascade page, exploring how they affect search results:
Quality Content
What influences your website more than any of the following factors is the main content of your page. Creating compelling and useful content is what drives users to come to your page in the first place, and it is what will prompt them to share that content and create the digital buzz that helps build the reputation and credibility of our site.
Good Site Hierarchy
Structure your site with the most important content up front — either linked from your homepage or easily accessed from it. This helps both users and search engines to determine what is most important about your site.
Readable Page URLs
The page name in Cascade is what forms the URL for your page. Cascade will correct you from using spaces or uppercase letters as these can lead to broken links, problems in your analytics data and hard to read URLs. Use descriptive words. This makes it easier for Google and your users to see what the page is about. If there are keywords in your page URL those will also be indexed in Google's results. To enhance the readability, we recommend hyphens (-) to separate words ("meeting-minutes" rather than "meetingminutes").
Concise Titles
Each page in your site should have a short, unique title. For most pages this is the Title field you are required to fill in. For directory pages the title is the First Name + Last Name fields. Your title will appear at the top of the content as the Heading 1 for the page, and is also used by search engines, browser windows and bookmarks*. It should clearly indicate to both Google and the person viewing your site what the page is about, and how it differs from other pages on your site.
*Each page in Cascade includes a hidden "title tag" that is used by search engines, browser windows and bookmarks. The title tag is auto-generated using the page's title that you set, any department info displayed in the banner area and the global site name. For example, the title tag for this page is "Searchability | Cascade Help | William & Mary."
Metatags
Keywords metatag: Google ignores keywords, so don't worry about these. If you've found the keywords field in Cascade, you can ignore that too; it's not connected to the keywords metatag on published pages.
Description metatag: This is submitted through the Summary field in Cascade. It tells search engines what the page is about. While this won't directly influence if your page appears in search results, it may be used by Google as a description of the page when it does show up in search results. The trick (again) is to be unique. Copying the same summary for every page in your site does not help users distinguish which of your pages they want to visit.
Useful Headings
Headings help to create a hierarchy of information on your page. If you skim the headings do you get the gist of what the page is about? Keep in mind: if users can find what they're looking for, so can search engines.
Accessible Images
Accessible content is favored by search engines.
Image File Names
Google looks at file names just as it looks at the URL and page name of your site. Giving it a meaningful name will help both you and search engines to find the images. Try something like crim-dell-bridge.jpg instead of IMG0123.jpg.
Images on the Page
All of your images must have "alt text" that is brief, descriptive and can serve as a reasonable alternative to the image. This gives screen readers and those not able to load images something to work with. Watch out for redundancy in your alt text — leave out phrases such as "image of" or similar extraneous content within your alt text.
Descriptive Links
Menu links and content links should tell users (and Google) something about the page they are linking to. This makes it easier for the user (especially those using a screen reader) and search engines to scan the page and find relevant links as well as understand what the page you’re linking to is about. For content links, do not use "click here" or similar phrases. Search engines key in on hyperlinked text — and users aren't searching for "click here."
Troubleshooting Tips
Why doesn't my page come up when I search for (insert term)?
Start by examining your content — this includes your page title, links, menus and headings as well as the main content.
- Do you mention the search term you’re looking for anywhere in your content?
- Is it important enough that you should adjust your title or teaser to include the term?
You never want to "stuff" your page with search keywords to try and increase your rankings. However, you need to know your user. If you find that people are searching for "agenda" when you are using the word "program" you may want to tweak your content to use that more common search term instead.
