SEO – Search Engine Optimization
When creating new pages, or revising existing ones, you want to make sure to set up some basic SEO – Search Engine Optimization.
90% of our traffic comes from search engines
For providence.edu sites, we get approximately 90% of our traffic from search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.) for most of our sites. For that reason, ensuring our pages are set up correctly so that the search engines can view and categorize them properly is very important.
Use the Search Engine Optimization Settings for more control
Setting up a handful of SEO options also allows us more granular control over how the pages are displayed within the search engines. By default, if the SEO fields below are NOT filled in, the search engines “scrape” our pages and use the title of the page and the first 300 (more or less) text characters on your page as the description when displaying search results. This may or may not be fine for your page, but filling out the SEO fields allows you a greater level of control so that you can display exactly how you want your pages to look when searched for.
How to setup the Search Engine Optimization settings
When you edit a page and scroll down toward the bottom of the page, you will see a section labeled Search Engine Optimization (see screenshot). If you do not see this section, it may be in a collapsed state or not installed on your site. Please contact the Web Services team if you cannot find it.
Defaults
By default- our SEO settings will automatically craft a meta title, meta description, and create facebook/twitter images drawn from your on-page content and featured image. IF you don’t want granular control over how your page appears in search engines you don’t have to do anything more (though you may want to read further for more information about SEO).
If you are working with digital ads and need to aggressively monitor/market with keywords, you may want to personally edit these fields.
Meta Title
Fill out the Title Tag section by using the example structure we’d use for this page – think smaller to larger. Page title, then the department separated by the “pipe” character. Please see the example below.
Search Engine Optimization Details | Web Services
It’s important to try and keep your title tag to less than 60 characters- longer than that and it may be cropped by the Search Engines. The SEO section will track the number of characters for you as you insert it.
We set up Title tags with this structure for a reason- it shows the relationship of the page, to the department linking them to each other and highlighting that relationship as it’s displayed on the various search engines. It’s important.
Meta Description
For the Meta Description, you want to write a concise description of what the page is about – what information a user might find here, it’s purpose etc. This Meta Description is what will be displayed below the page’s title in search engine results, for example, this page may be described as follows:
The basics of ensuring pages are optimized for Search Engines. And also to provide support information for further optimization.
Keep your Meta Description between 150-160 characters – the SEO section will track this number for you. This length ensures that the description is fully displayed in search engine results without being truncated, providing a concise summary of the content that encourages users to click through.
Facebook/Twitter Image
Use these fields to insert an image that will accompany text when someone is sharing a link to your page. By default the system will automatically use the featured image for the page if you don’t include one in these fields. If you don’t include a featured image, Facebook or Twitter will just use the first image found on the page- which may not be optimal.
Canonical URL
Please leave this field blank. Canonical urls/tags help to steer search engines to the correct, or most correct, page when similar pages or pages containing similar information on them are presented. More information on canonical urls is available at SEMRush.
Hide from Search Results
Leave this as-is. By turning this on, the page will not show in search results or the site map- basically excluding it from being found in searches. Users still may get to it if it is linked to from another page. If you have a situation where you want a page to be on the site, but excluded from search, reach out to Web Services for guidance.
Some SEO Tips…
- Write Short Titles – Use a maximum title length of 60 characters. More characters and your title will be truncated when displayed in search results. Less and you aren’t taking advantage of the valuable display space in search results.
- Identify Your Description Keywords – You want to thoughtfully place as many keywords as possible in your description, yet still ensure it makes sense and is readable by a human viewer. The key is to determine which keywords you want to place high for in search results without jamming a bunch of nonsensical words in your description- this is called “Keyword Stuffing”. Web Services can assist you in determining those keywords. When in doubt, keep it simple, descriptive and to the point.
- The Important Keywords Go First – Make sure to craft your description so that the important keywords fall first in order. You may have to put on your writing cap for this one.
- Be Descriptive – the more descriptive you can be in describing what the page is about, the better. It will not only make more sense to the user, it will get you more traffic and better search ranking.
- Create Unique On-Page Titles – This is VERY important. All page titles NEED to be unique. Google (and the other search engines) will actually penalize sites that have multiple, repetitive page titles.
Drop us a line at Web Services if you have questions or would like to go over the search engine visibility of your site.
