By Patty Bradley, Web Administrator
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Why Your Search Engine Ranking is Important
If your site doesn't show up on Google or other popular search engines, no one except those you tell about your site will find it. Let's say, for example, a prospective student types the words "school of public health" into Google. If the SPH web site turns up high on the list of resulting web sites, then SPH has a better chance of recruiting this student.
The higher a websites PageRank, the higher it will show up in search results. Google and other search engines use secret algorithms pointing to dozens of factors to determine PageRank.
How Search Engines Work
The higher your web site's search engine ranking on important key words is, the better. So how do you increase your site's search engine ranking? In order to answer this question, you need to understand how search engines work. They all work differently. Here is how they work in general:
- They send out "spiders" or "robots" that comb through web pages, recording URLs, page titles, content and meta data. They move from a page to every page linked to from it, and from those pages to every page linked to from them, in a spider-web-like fashion. A count is kept on how many times the robot comes across each page.
- They use information submitted by Web Masters.
What This Means
- The more web sites that link to your site, the more times the robots will come across it, and the higher your ranking will be.
- Your URLs are important
- Your page titles are important
- The content on your pages is important
- The meta data on your pages is important
Determine your Keywords
The first step in optimizing the findability of your web site is to make a list of the words and phrases that someone might use in a search engine query to find sites like yours. For the SPH web site, we might list the following:
- school of public health
- graduate school public health
- public health school
- masters public health
There are tools to help you do this. Google Search Console is one. Once you sign up and enter the details of your website, look at Search Analytics under Search Traffic. This will show you what words people typed into Google to find your site. Google Analytics can do the same thing.
The Popularity Contest
The number of sites that link to your site is the number one determinant of your Google PageRank. Moreover, the popularity of the sites that link to yours matter. The bulk of search engine optimization tactics revolve around getting other popular sites to link to yours. So how do you get other sites to link to yours?
Make a quality website: The better your website is, the more sites will link to it. Read on for specifics.
Target appropriate sites, such as affiliates/partners, business/trade web sites and related sites.
One way to find related sites is to use Google to see what sites are "related" to yours. Go to Google and search on "related:www.yoursite.com" (substituting "yoursite.com" with your own domain). You will see a list of the sites Google thinks are related to yours.
Additionally, you can find out what sites already do link to your site with Google. Search on "link:www.yoursite.com" (substituting "yoursite.com" with your own domain).
Once you target sites, contact the webmaster of each one and ask for a link exchange. If you offer to link to their site, they will be more likely to link to yours.
Get people talking about your site. Today there are plenty of social media sites (such as blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) where people post content, including links. A social media campaign could greatly increase your web site visibility.
Pay attention to the words that link to your site. Having other sites use your keywords in their link labels will help increase your search engine ranking on those keywords.
Use Human-Readable URLs
Outside of getting popular sites to link to your site, your URL is the most important factor for search engines. A web site about diabetes with the URL www.diabetes.org will rank higher than one with the URL www.sph.umich.edu/diabetes/. If you can, use your most important keywords in your URL. The order of words as well as the density of words are important.
This is true for your entire URL, not just your domain. Name sub-directories that represent the sections of your web site for that section. For example, The "About" section of the SPH web site has the URL www.sph.umich.edu/about/.
Spell out article titles in page names using dashes. For example, an article about Nutritional Epigenetics. should be named nutritional-epigenetics.html.
Here is how it works:
- Best results come from having the keywords as part of your domain name (e.g., www.diabetes.org)
- Having the keyword as a subdomain is second best (e.g., diabetes.sph.umich.edu)
- Having the keyword as a directory name is third best (e.g., www.sph.umich.edu/diabetes/)
- Having the keyword in a file name is fourth best (e.g., www.sph.umich.edu/diabetes.html)
Provide Good Page Titles
Web page titles count for a lot, too. I am referring to what comes between the opening and closing title tags in the head section of your documents, and appears in the title bar of the web browser when viewing the page. Page titles are extremely important to Google and usually shown in search engine results.
Be sure to use short, descriptive page titles. Be sure to make the titles different on all your pages, but make sure that all of them include the site's main title. The page your are reading is in the Web Services section of the Instructional & Computing Services website. Hence the title tag is as follows:
<title>Improving Your Site's Search Engine Ranking - Web Services - UM SPH Instructional & Computing Services</title>
Read more on descriptive page titles from Google Webmasters Support
Provide Good Content
Search engines like Google actually record the content on your page and use it in their search algorithms. If your site is about preventing diabetes, saying so on your page will increase your search engine rankings for searches on "preventing diabetes." The first 200 words on a web page are crucial. The first 2 or 3 sentences may be used in search engine result listings. A well-written first paragraph, packed with keywords, can do wonders for your search engine ranking.
When I say content, I mean the actual text on your page, not text images. Search engines cannot read text images, although they can read alt tags. Make sure that there is text on your site's homepage describing your site and its purpose. Each sub-page or section should also contain text describing their purpose.
Use Sound Structural and Valid Markup
Headings are extremely important to Google. Google weighs text contained inside headings higher than text that is not. Your page is bound to include headings and sub-headings. Be sure to enclose that text in actual heading tags. Your site name should use the highest-level heading, h1, sub-headings in the next-highest-level heading, h2, etc.
Google also gives high priority to alternative text for images and titles for links. Be sure to use these attributes in your pages.
Finally, pages with valid markup naturally receive higher search engine rankings than do pages with invalid markup. See the world wide web consortium for more information.
Provide Good Meta Data
Meta data is defined by the meta tags you use in the head section of your HTML document. Meta tags form name-content pairs. The name is stated in the value of the name attribute and the content is stated in the value of the content attribute. You can make up your own meta tags, but the important ones to use are:
- Content-Type
- author
- title
- copyright
- description
- keywords
The most important one for search engines is description. The description of your site should be succinct yet comprehensive. Each page on your site should contain a unique description, and that description should say what that page is about. The character limit for descriptions is 250 characters.
Keywords are not used by Google, but are still used by some search engines. Keywords should contain your entire list of keywords. Listing the same keyword multiple times in meta data will not increase your search results rankings in searches for that keyword. Indeed, many search engines will penalize you for doing so.
Here are the actual meta tags we use for the SPH web site:
<meta name="description" content="The University of Michigan School of Public Health will be the premier academic institution in public health recognized for the way it integrates research, teaching, service and practice in a diverse environment to develop effective solutions to public health problems." />
<meta name="keywords" content="school of public health, michigan public health, public health, University of Michigan, UM-SPH, graduate schools, biostatistics, environmental health sciences, epidemiology, health behavior, health education, health management, health policy, nutritional sciences" />
<meta name="copyright" content="Copyright 2017 The Regents of the University of Michigan" />
OU Campus, the content management system used for the SPH website, allows you to enter a meta description and keywords in the Page Properties screen.
Read more on good meta descriptions from Google Webmasters Support
Update your Content Often
Most-recently updated pages rate higher in search engine listings. Adding a "date updated" date to your pages helps, but search engines know when pages were last updated.
Accessibility
Most of the strategies found here also help increase how accessible your site is to people with disabilities. Remember, it's not just how your pages look to people that matters; how they look to machines is equally important.
Summary
The success of Google and other search engines have made search engine optimization a must-do for web masters. There is a lot that you can do on your own to optimize your site, and well-written, well-coded web sites rise to the top of the optimized pack naturally.