Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques can improve rankings, drive traffic, and increase awareness for your website in search engines.

SEO deals with building search engine-friendly websites, but the techniques - when used properly - make your site better for people using it as well.

General SEO tips

Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.
Design your site to have a clear conceptual page hierarchy.
Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
Make sure that your <title> element (the page title) and alternative (alt) text for images are descriptive and accurate.
Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
Create descriptive URLs. Place yourself in the mind of a user and look at your URL. If you can easily and accurately predict the content you'd expect to find on the page, your URL is appropriately descriptive.
Avoid embedding important text in images.
Don't place content in hidden elements such as tabs or expanding sections. Search engines consider this content less accessible to users, and believe that you should make your most important information visible in the default page view.
Ensure that all links go to live web pages. Find and fix broken links.
Design your site for all device types and sizes, including desktops, tablets, and smartphones.
Ensure that your pages are accessible to people of all abilities.

The WCMS is designed for optimal search engine indexing. Following the below techniques will help to ensure SEO on your WCMS pages.

Add a brief and concise summary of the page's content, preferably 150 characters or less.
- This is used in the description meta tag and may be used by search engines to display a snippet about the page in search results.
Use plain text.
If appropriate, work keywords into the summary.
Have a unique summary for each page.

Create content as text within the WCMS. Documents (such as PDF and Word files) and other non-text content are often ignored or devalued by search engines.
Make your first paragraph concise yet descriptive; work in keywords that are appropriate to page content (but don't "overstuff" the text with your keywords).
Use proper heading structure and descriptive headings.

Provide descriptive alternative (alt) text to give search engines and site visitors a text description of the visual content.
Give your images good filenames before uploading to the WCMS. Filenames should provide a good description of the subject matter of the image. For example, my-new-black-kitten.jpg is a lot more informative than IMG00023.JPG.

You generally do not need to change/add information in the meta tags section. It defaults to using the page Title and Summary from your page (see above), and other fields in the "basic" meta tags section such as keywords, abstract, etc. are generally not used by search engines. One example where you might do so is for content types with listing pages, where the summary is used on the listing page, and you want to provide a different summary to search engines.
Keep in mind that other sections in the meta tags section are used for social sharing such as on Twitter and Facebook.

Select "Prevents search engines from indexing this page" in the meta tags section under "Advanced tags".