Content is key. Help Readers Find it.
Use best practices when writing or editing content for your page:
- Present the information they expect to find on the page
- Focus on readers' needs, not organizational structure
- Avoid university jargon—readers use common words in a search to find information
- Use metadata: subheadings, keywords, titles, and descriptions—subheadings should be formatted with h tags
- A page's meta description is required in Cascade. This should be one sentence, include your primary keyword (i.e. the program name), and be clear about the content of the page.
- Cascade now has an AI assistant to write the meta description for you. Always review the content before submitting.
- Content should be no more than a few sentences at a time - small paragraphs are easy to scan - walls of text are usually skipped over; use bulleted lists when possible.
How to Improve Your Search Engine Ranking
Using metadata and ensuring your content makes sense on a page, you can also:
- Always look for external linking opportunities, especially high-ranking sites like news outlets and other higher education sites
- Look for additional ways to link from one page in our CMS to another, this also helps to cut down on duplicate content (which Google frowns upon)
- Complete some keyword research before building a page and determine which keywords rank higher than others