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Making content searchable

When you create a web page it’s important to not only have up-to-date and easy-to-understand content, but to ensure the page is searchable.

Generally speaking, web pages can be found by search engines through certain key words or phrases you have used on the pages, especially in titles and sub-headings.

Search engines also look for what’s called ‘metadata’.

Using metadata

Metadata is decided upon by authors as part of the process of creating new content.

The WebCMS content templates include a table that asks you to insert meta keywords and a meta description to help optimise searching.

To complete the table, put yourself in the shoes of someone looking for your web page.

Think about an overall description that is clear and concise and some key words that person would choose to search on.

Meta descriptions

A meta description is a sentence that summarises the content of the web page. It will appear in the results that are returned in a search engine. It includes:

  • main words from the title and ECU

  • a maximum of 160 characters

For example, the meta description for the ‘Our services’ intranet web page for Brand and Marketing is:

'Overview of services provided by Brand and Marketing at ECU.'

Meta keywords

Meta key words are words that you think people might search on to find your page and are:

  • in lower case
  • separated with a comma and space
  • no more than 15 words
  • in this order: {primary word}, {secondary word}, {ecu}, {edith cowan university}

For example, the meta keywords for the same Marketing web page are:

marketing, communications, online, sponsorship, student recruitment, public relations, events, advertising, media, corporate, web, style, pr, logo, brochures, publications, ecu, edith cowan university

Search friendly documents

The same principles of searchability apply to downloadable documents as well.

For more information, see our Document metadata guides.

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