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Search standards for your site

Your website will not be much use, no matter how well it is designed, if no one can find it on the web. Search engines such as Google look for metadata to formulate a list of search responses. It may also be possible to introduce a Search facility into your site. This can be negotiated with MDU by via web enquiries.

Consider how a potential (external) user is likely to want to access your information, for example by the services offered rather than the unit name (ie 'discrimination' rather than 'Equity and Diversity Unit').

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

SEO is a new concept in internet marketing. SEO involves modifying a website to increase its ranking in result listings of search engines. This means you will direct more traffic to your site.

Strategies to achieve SEO are contained in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) (Powerpoint - 566kb). As web authors, you can implement some of these strategies in the following ways:

Domain names

Create meaningful URLs and make folder and file names short and relevant. Urls should be simple, short and have no hyphens, no numbers. Use keywords, common words, advertising terms or product names.

Linking strategies

The more inbound links to your site, the higher the search engine ranking . Therefore make a list of external sites and contact them to ask them to link to you. Also, request that they use relevant anchor text (inbound link words) when linking to you, eg ‘Study at UniSA’ rather than ‘click here’

Keywords

Where possible, use keywords in your content, title tags, meta description tags and alt tags.

Metadata

Title tags play the most important role in SEO. Use promotional language dotted with keywords that sell your website (up to 65 characters, including letter spacings). Meta description tags are more important than meta keywords. Write a strong promotional line that encapsulates the features of your website or product. Make sure that the default pages of your main sites have these.

Further information on SEO

 

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