Search Engine Optimisation for Content Editors

It often surprises me how little emphasis many institutions place on search engine optimisation. Many believe that the sheer size of their site and regularity of their updates is sufficient to succeed in their online marketplace. For me, this theory just doesn't wash.

As an institution, you will be updating your site more than most organisations – publishing news articles, events and research papers, as well as creating lots of rich content such as videos and podcasts, which search engines love.

The problem lies, however, with your competition. Other institutions will undoubtedly be updating their content just as regularly as you are and they too are publishing videos, podcasts and linking to their work from social media channels. Effective search engine optimisation is the only way to rank higher than your competition for the keywords that matter.

Considering SEO in everything that is published

Fast-forward a few months and your organization has finally developed an SEO strategy and identified a set of keywords for each area of your website. How can an editor ensure that their content is effectively optimized before publication?

Page titles

The page title is the single most important SEO element on the page. Writing just the title of the page, or a quick description is wasting an opportunity to optimise your work.

Page titles should contain relevant keywords and be no longer than the 70-character limit Google can display in its search results. Important keywords should be placed nearer the start of the title, without making an impact on conveying what the page is actually about.

URLs

Most content management systems are terrible at creating search-engine friendly URLs from the pages you create. They often automatically create long strings, containing large numbers and characters that only your web database can understand. However, most systems will give you an option to create your own text for the final section of the URL.

Keep your URLs short and friendly, describing the content of the page, including relevant keywords where possible.

Meta keywords and descriptions

While today's Google algorithm only considers meta descriptions, I would still encourage the use of meta keywords to maintain a strong position should Google reintroduce their consideration in a future update.

Before publishing a page, most CMS systems will display a dialogue for you to enter keywords and a page description. For those working directly in the code, meta-data should be placed in the head of your page and is written as follows:

You should use around 5 keywords, which describe the content of the page and take reference from your institution's global keywords. Selecting more than 10 keywords is a wasted effort.

Your meta description should be no more than 150 characters, describe the content of the page and include relevant keywords where possible.

Header elements

Ensure your page is composed semantically, using a H1 for your headline title, H2 for your subtitles and so on. Where possible without detracting from meaning, use keywords to form part of these titles.

Alt text

Ensure you enter descriptive alt text for your links and images, including keywords if you are able to do so without detracting from its meaning.

Internal links

Linking between your own pages is not only simple, but has a real effect on SEO. Adding a related links boxout to your page, containing a handful of other pages that may be of interest to your audience can easily help to achieve this.

Inbound links

Google considers the number and quality of pages linking back to your content in its ranking algorithm. While you can't always encourage others to link to your content, there are ways you create your own inbound links.

When creating a press release, or publishing a new video – why not link to your page from your social media channels? Tweeting a link to your page or sharing your link on Facebook creates an inbound link and also allows other users to share or retweet your post, further increasing the number of inbound links to your content. Using social bookmarking tools such as Digg, Reddit and stumbleupon can also be a useful exercise.

Train your editors in the power of SEO

Many institutions have a wide variety of people contributing to the site including everyone from PR officers and web experts to administrators and researchers. It can often be difficult to convey the importance of SEO across the institution.

Campuscontent can help your institution create, implement of improve its SEO strategy. We offer a number of training courses at competitive rates, including:

• SEO: The Basics
• Writing for the web and search engines

Get in touch, we'd love to heard from you!