write your content
Metadata
Writing great metadata for each page of your site is as important as writing the content itself. These metadata will be invisible to your users, but they will help search engines find your pages and can help rank your pages as well.
The head area
The head area for each page contains information about the current document—such as its title, description, and keywords that may be useful to search engines—and other data that is not considered document content. Except for the title tag, this information is usually invisible to your reader.
The components we use are:
- Title
- Description
- Keywords
You can see head information for a website by selecting “view source” in your browser software. A dialog box should come up that looks like this:
Title
The title tag should be short and concise but still be clear and understandable. The title appears at the top of the browser window when a page is loaded. It is used as the name of the page when it’s added to a “favorites” or “bookmarks” list, so you definitely want it to be recognizable. For instance, “welcome” is not a good title for a webpage because you will not be able to recognize which site the label is from, and you could have multiple sites with that name.
The title is also used as the title in search listings, and the page is usually ranked most heavily based on the words in the title.
Two good examples:
Undergraduate admissions at K-State
Career and Employment Services at K-State
Don’t include terms like Office of, Division of, etc. Users aren’t interested in hierarchy and don't care that it’s an office or department; they just want to find the information.
It's also important to make the title clear. While we need to know that it’s the CES office at K-State rather than at MIT, if you put K-State at the beginning of your title and you bookmark multiple K-State pages or use the K-State search engine, you’ll get a long list of K-States. And when a long title appears in a bookmark, it usually gets truncated, so it’s better to put the topic first, not the university.
Description
The description metatag is used by some search engines, including K-State’s, as a one-sentence descriptor of the page. It is listed below the title.
It should be concise, but specific and should not repeat information already in the title. For instance, instead of “This leads to all you need to know about admissions at K-State,” it would be more helpful and descriptive to say “You can request information, apply to K-State, find tuition information, and more from the Office of Admissions.”
Another example: “Career and Employment Services offers job listings, workshops on resumes and interviews, career fairs, on-campus jobs, and more.”
Some search engines create their own description of your page or may use the first one or two sentences of your text. So clearly state the purpose of your site in that all-important first sentence.
Keywords
Keywords basically give search engines additional information, along with your body copy, to index your site. Many search engines no longer use keywords, but K-State’s does.
Note that because not all external search engines use keywords, it is important that you put much of your effort into your title tag and descriptor tag.
Keywords should work in conjunction with the text in your body copy. For example, keywords on the course schedule page can be "line schedule" and "timetable" (as well as courses, classes, etc.) since other universities use those titles as well.
These should be specific to your page topic or topics. Don’t use Kansas, K-State, Kansas State University, Wildcats, etc., unless your page is specifically about Willie the Wildcat. In the admissions section possible keywords would be application, freshman, transfer, international, etc.
Use keywords your audience will scan for (even if the words aren’t what insiders in your office call things). For instance, though at K-State we call it financial assistance, one of your keywords or phrases should be financial aid, in addition to scholarships, tuition, loans, grants, costs, work study, scholarship application, money for school, etc. You can use up to 25 words or phrases separated by semicolons.
How to apply metadata
To add a title in Contribute
You first create your page title when you create a page. See how you name pages during page creation.
To edit a page name, following the following steps:
- Browse to the page you want to edit or change the title for, and then click the Edit Page button in the toolbar. A draft will open in your Contribute window.
- Select Format from the pull down menu and select Page properties. The page properties dialog box will appear. (See below)
- Type title changes in the title pane.
- Click OK.
Adding keywords and descriptions in Contribute
To add or change keywords and a description for a page:
- Browse to the page you want to add keywords and a description for, and then click the Edit Page button in the toolbar. A draft will open in your contribute window.
- Select Format from the pull down menu and select Keywords and Descriptions. The page keywords and description dialog box will appear. (See below)
- Enter or change keywords in the Keywords pane. Separate each keyword with a comma.
- Enter or change the page description in the Description pane.
- Click OK.