When creating a new web page, it is important to ask yourself the following questions:
- Does it belong on the UniSC website?
- Is the information tailored to the needs of your target audience/s?
- Is the information already on the UniSC website? ie is there duplicate content
- Do I have high quality images I can use?
Before creating a new page, send your finalised content in a Word document to the website team to review via our website support form on UniSC Connect. The website team will then advise the best location for the new web page. Content may be reviewed and edits made prior to approval. Web editors will then be sent an approved location to create a new web page / s.
To create your page
Follow these steps:
- If the parent page allows child pages underneath it, hover over the name of the parent page in the Content section and click ••• to view the types of pages you can create.
- Select the page type you wish to create. The new page is loaded in the editor on the right-hand side.
- Enter a Name for the page in the 'Enter a name...' field at the top of the web page.
- You will be prompted to add a review date and description on the Metadata tab before it will allow you to save your page.
Metadata
Metadata are keywords that search functions use to identify your web page. All pages in Umbraco include a metadata tab. This tab contains properties like keywords, content summary, review date, and others as applicable to each document type. Metadata improves the search visibility of your webpage – both for the UniSC website and external search engines such as Google.
Google will use the text in the description field in their search results and so does our own site search, so it is very important that your page description is succinct and describes the page accurately.
- Keywords: Think carefully about your keywords – include words that describe your content but may not actually be used anywhere in the text. Different visitors will use different search terms, don't let your pages become invisible.
- Description: Enter a short 1-2 sentence description about what visitors can find on the web page. This will form the page summary in search results.
- Review date: The review date is normally set to 6 months in advance on all new web pages unless you have a reason to want to see the page before then - maybe you know that some of the content will need updating in, say, 2 months, in which case set the date accordingly. If you are reviewing an existing web page remember to update the review date before saving and sending to publish. The maximum date you can set a review date is 6 months, however, you can pick a date anytime in between that suits you.
Boosting search results
Boosting helps to surface more relevant content for a given search term - without boosting, a page mentioning 'science' multiple times may rank higher than the Bachelor of Science page, even though the program page is likely a better result. Fields are given a relevance boost, in this order:
- page name and keywords are boosted 5x
- description and main content are boosted 3x
- tags are boosted 2x
Accurate keywords and a concise description contribute to a more robust and reliable search index, which means better results for users. Adding variations of the same keyword won't influence the search results. Much like off-site SEO, write accessible content for users to read. This will have the best impact on search result relevance.
Featured search terms
The website team can set results as featured terms to always return in the first position, with additional visual priority. This is useful for promoting particular pages that would otherwise not be returned for a given search, or may be part of a large result set and potentially overlooked. For example, 'science' returns the study area page as a featured result. Contact the website team for more information.