1 In order to help you understand what SEO efforts will work for which kind of search, I’m going to start by explaining some of the key differences between ’s search and our own University search.

I’ll then go into some of the more interesting aspects of how Google works beyond the U’s search and along the way I’ll give you tips and tricks to push your site toward the top for both types of searches.

Toward the end, I’ll tell you what information you need to talk with your web developers about SEO and what info you should talk with your content contributors about.

And no, this presentation isn’t sponsored by Moz, but I will be referencing it a number of times. For those of you who may not have heard of Moz, they’re an excellent reference for SEO and provide an SEO tool called MozPro. Backlinko is another great source. I’ll have some other tool recommendations toward the end of the presentation.

2 The University uses what’s known as an enterprise search solution and uses the Appliance to deliver our search results. This is why the results you get from a search on umn.edu will often be different from what you see when you perform the same search on Google.

The U’s search serves results only from umn.edu, with a few exceptions for sites like Gophersports.com. Google gives you results from everywhere. Google also has ads in their search results and the U doesn’t. We’re also able to customize the look of our results pages, also known as SERP. The algorithm that delivers the U’s search results is based on the and not on the full, top secret algorithm that operates on Google. And, according to Google, personalized search gives them the ability to customize search results based on a user’s previous 180 days of search history, which is linked to an anonymous cookie in your browser. This is how Google personalizes results when you’re not signed in under a . When you’re signed in, Google stores your Google web history and search is personalized even more. This same kind of personalization is not done on the U’s search.

3 So, what does this mean for SEO? Do all our SEO efforts pay off for both the U’s search and for Google search? The answer to that is mostly.

Following the basics of SEO will have an impact on both google.com and the U’s search, though google.com is regularly tweaking it’s algorithm. The Google Search Appliance at the U is at least as mysterious as google.com. We know the search appliance has a different algorithm, but we don’t know what it is or if it ever changes.

The following slides will indicate when an SEO tip will work for Google and when it will also work for the U’s search results.

4 Let’s start with some metadata basics. Metadata is code that is written into web pages to describe things about the page. Metadata is not seen by people when they visit a , but it helps search engines know what your page is about in ways that the visible content doesn’t always do.

The title metatag provides search engines and searchers with a concise description of the content that will be found on a web page.

The text included between the tags is displayed as the clickable first line in search results. Google displays approximately 55 characters in search results before truncating the text.

Meta titles also appear as text in web browser tabs, aiding people in finding specific pages among many open tabs.

Google suggests these four things for making effective page titles (see slide).

5 Here at the U, writing a good metadata title can be tricky when we’re looking at multiple levels of information. In this example, you can see that search results for “tuition” brings up four pages that all appear to be the same. The only way to see how they differ is by looking at the URL, which is not something you should expect your potential visitors to have to do to find your information.

Moz suggests that meta titles use keywords and not necessarily your page title. Often, however, those things will be the same. A well done title metatag for many University pages will tell you the name of the page, followed by any subunit, program, or whatever secondary information makes sense for the page, and end with the main site name.

So in the case of the first search result here, a better meta title might be “Tuition and Fees | Information Technology Infrastructure Program | College of Continuing Education.” Of course, with that line length, the college name will be cut off, but the search engine will still see it and be able to make assumptions about your content because it’s getting more complete information.

6 In fact, Moz has a page with lots of great information about title tags. It also includes a title tag preview tool to show you how much of your title will show up in a Google search result.

As you can see here, the college name was indeed cut off from this title, but the new title tag does a better job of matching what the actual content is on the page and will be better at helping the person who’s searching for this specific program’s tuition.

7 Another metadata tag that people often neglect to use or use incorrectly is the metadata description. The text included in the meta description provides people and search engines with a short summary of the content found on a page. The description is sometimes what’s displayed as the second line of search engine results and should be about 155 characters in length.

However, Google may choose to use a snippet of text from the content of the page if it deems the text to be more relevant to the page topic than the description text or in the absence of description text. Regardless, for most sites it makes sense to include appropriate description text.

While descriptions have no impact on search rankings, they can increase the click through from search results by expanding on the search title and being highly relevant to the topic being searched.

So, follow Google’s suggestions for meta descriptions (see slide).

8 Metadata keywords. As many of you may know, Google clearly states that the metadata keywords are not used, so there’s no compelling reason to include them. You probably won’t be punished by Google if you include them, but you won’t be rewarded, either. Meta keywords will not improve SEO.

9 So, now I want to talk a little bit about the canonical tag in metadata. A canonical tag references your canonical URL. A canonical URL is the main web address for your site.

According to Wikipedia, a canonical link element is an HTML element that helps webmasters prevent duplicate content issues by specifying the canonical or preferred version of a web page as part of SEO.

Think of it as your one true URL. Let me give you some examples.

10 Oftentimes, especially here at the U, a site’s URL will change for various reasons.

For example, the Twin Cities home page has cycled through a number of .

In order to make sure search engines understand that the former URLs are no longer where we want people to go, we’ve indicated our canonical URL in our metadata and have set up redirects for the old URLs.

I’ll explain more about that in a minute.

11 Besides your site’s URL possibly changing, it’s possible to have the same URL and still have a number of non-canonical URLs.

This happens when you add https and http to the mix. It also happens when your site is set up to work with or without www.

This example shows that by combining these things, you can come up with 4 different URLs for your website. Search engines look at this and assume each of these is a different site, because they are!

So, what’s the solution?

12 The most complete way to fix this issue is to use a combination of metadata to declare your canonical URL and 301 redirects for any URLs that may be the same as your canonical site URL.

As you can see in this example, a search for dining services on the U’s search brings up five different home pages for the U Dining Services site. Their canonical site appears to be www.dining.umn.edu, but the metadata on their site doesn’t indicate that it is. They also have home page links for www.umn.edu/dining with slash at the end, then the same URL without the slash, an https version of the same URL, and a version without the www. Most of these pages are redirecting, which is good, but they’re not using the appropriate kind of redirect. That’s why all of them still show up in the U’s search results.

Interestingly, Google seems to be more forgiving for sites that don’t use the canonical meta tag. All these results are turning up on the U’s search, but only the top result comes up in a Google search. So, even if Google is able to better figure out which site is your canonical site, the U’s search needs help. A combination of a canonical metatag along with a 301 redirect for any non-canonical home pages will solve this issue.

13 So now I’d like to move on to URL structure and it’s place in SEO. Keeping URLs as simple, relevant, compelling, and accurate as possible is key to getting both your users and search engines to understand them. The best practice for URLs is to use words that people can comprehend.

URLs should be definitive but concise. By seeing only the URL, a person and search engine should have a good idea of what to expect on the page, but the URL should not spell out the full title of the page. It’s best to keep URLs as short as possible. A best practice is to have no more than 3 to 5 words in the file path. That’s the part after the last slash in the URL.

When necessary for readability, use hyphens to separate words. URLs should not use underscores, spaces, or any other characters to separate words. Use lowercase letters. In some cases, uppercase letters can cause issues with duplicate pages. For example, moz.com/ Blog and moz.com/blog might be seen as two distinct URLs, which might create issues with duplicate content.

14 Our usability studies on search have shown that people first look at the title tag to determine if the search result is what they think they want. They then tend to look at the description, and then the URL.

I did two searches for “application deadlines” – one on the U’s web and one on the University of Wisconsin. In this example of the School of Public Health from the U’s search, you can see that the title “application deadlines” is also the same as the URL. They’ve used hyphens to separate the words in their URL and they’re using the full words, not abbreviations.

In the two Wisconsin examples below that, you can see that the search terms “application deadlines” are not found in their page titles and the URLs are meaningless. These URLs, along with the poorly named “To Apply” page in their first example, may have helped land them on page 4 and page 6 respectively on search results on the Wisconsin site. And I gave up trying to find them in Google, even after adjusting the search to “University of Wisconsin graduate application deadlines.”

15 And just a little aside here before I move on to SEO on Google, keep your sites on umn.edu.

I’m sure some of you have folks in your units that think they should be on a .com or .net or some other type of domain. If so, you might want to let them know that they’re more likely to show up in search results if they stay on umn.edu due to the higher credibility that Google and other search engines give to .edu domains.

In fact, we receive a large number of backlink requests from people outside the University all the time. Domains outside .edu or .gov sites are always looking for ways to get these sites to link to them in order to increase their site’s credibility.

16 For the next few slides, I’m going to be talking about things that are just related to Google and not the U’s search.

So, how does Google know what you’re looking for? Well, that’s a secret. Google doesn’t tell us exactly what goes into their secret sauce, but they do hint at some of the ingredients.

They ask questions about your search terms. How many times does a page contain the search terms being used? Do the search terms appear in your page title? Are they in the URL?

Does the page include synonyms for the search terms? Is the site a quality site with content that people seem to find accurate or useful?

Even if we knew all the questions on Google’s list, we’d never have the time to address them all. But based on some of the questions we know they ask, we can do our best to configure our content to answer to the question.

17 About a year ago, for what it’s worth, Google admitted to the top three factors they look at in delivering search results. I say for what it’s worth, because this was a year ago. And Google changes. Often.

Google said that links and content were its top two factors, but they wouldn’t say which came first. So that’s kinda broad.

Links and content. I think there’s a little more behind that than just having a page of text that includes some links. I would imagine those things would have to have some quality to them.

We all know we need to produce quality content on our pages. The links you make to other quality content are also important and the links that come to you from quality sites will help your search ranking. These are very basic SEO concepts.

The third top factor that Google uses in ranking your site is called RankBrain. That’s the term for the algorithm. This algorithm is making semantic search possible. I’ll explain more about that in a minute.

18 So, what does RankBrain actually do? RankBrain is mainly used as a way to interpret the searches that people submit to find pages that might not have the exact words that were searched for.

The problem is that Google processes three billion searches per day. In 2007, Google said that 20 percent to 25 percent of those queries had never been seen before. In 2013, it brought that number down to 15 percent. But 15 percent of three billion is still a huge number of queries never entered by any human searcher — 450 million per day.

Among those can be complex, multi-word queries, also called “long-tail” queries. RankBrain is designed to help better interpret those queries and effectively translate them to find the best pages for the searcher.

Google says RankBrain can see patterns between seemingly unconnected complex searches to understand how they’re actually similar to each other. This learning, in turn, allows it to better understand future complex searches and whether they’re related to particular topics. It can then associate these groups of searches with results that it thinks searchers will like the most.

19 RankBrain allows Google to try to understand what content is about and how your search relates to that content. This process is called semantic search.

We see evidence of this when articles rank for keywords that are not found anywhere in the article (or in pointing to the article). One simple example of this is the search for “internet marketing,” which returns Quick Sprout’s guide to online marketing in the number one position. The word “internet” is not found anywhere in the guide.

20 In search results, Google bolds not only your search terms, but synonyms for your search terms in the description snippet.

Looking at these synonyms is a good way to find the words you should include in your content for the searches people do to find your content.

For example, One Stop may want to consider adding the words “average” and “price” to their page about tuition. These are synonyms to the “cost” and “rates” terms that they do use in their content and these words show up in results from other .

21 Moving away now from semantic search, I’d like to talk briefly about structured data and schema tags. This is something we’re just starting to look at in U Relations and we’re thinking about it for our news releases and feature articles. Structured data markup describes things on the web, along with their properties. For example, if your site has articles, you could use schema markup to describe properties for each article, such as the title, the author, the date published, the article’s image, and so on. You can use schema tags on the address of your college, your courses, your notable alumni, or any awards that may have been won.

Schema tags are still fairly underused for SEO, but Google is noticing when universities use them. In the examples above, you can see that a search for “architecture course” produces an MIT result that includes links to three of their courses below the description. A search for “statistics course” produces a boxed snippet in Google with a Stanford course. Getting a snippet is a big deal in search results and all of this is happening because these institutions have used schema tags for their content. If you’d like to find out more about how schema tags work, there are lots of articles out there. The actual tags can be found at schema.org.

22 Now I want to switch and talk about the U’s search for a minute.

We are about to launch a new search interface to University. We spent nearly a year getting input about search and developing this interface in collaboration with OIT and campus web developers and communicators.

You’ve already seen the new interface if you’ve done a search from the U home page or from search.umn.edu. This is the search home page. It features a large search field with help text, filters for web, people, and departments, and a list of commonly used links based on audience.

23 This new interface was developed to replace tabbed search and address a number of issues that we were seeing with search at the U in general. It’s built in the Google Search Appliance and takes advantage of some of the features available there.

You may be familiar with keymatches. If you look at the old tabbed search example on the left, you can see that we used to pull out our keymatches in a way that made people think of them as ads. The new design keeps the keymatches inline with the general search results so that they look less like ads.

You can still see the first three people search results in the right column and link off to more people results. And we’ve added a “Narrow Your Search” section that brings up results that are similar to your search terms and may help you find what you’re looking for.

We’re soon going to be adding two more filters—one for campus maps and one for campus news.

24 All University units are highly encouraged to use this new search interface and you’ll hear more about it once we launch, but for now I want to highlight the use of keymatches as a supplement to SEO on the University’s search results.

All University units have the ability to submit keymatch requests for the Twin Cities search results. University Relations manages the keymatches that you see when doing a search from the Twin Cities home page or the search.umn.edu site.

There’s lots of room for improvement with central keymatches and we could use your help in setting them up for your unit. If you’d like to submit a list of keymatches, please use the z link to find the instructions. Adding more keymatches from units across the University will go a long way in improving our search results.

And if you’re already using the Google Search Appliance on your site, you are able to set up your own keymatches as well. This might be something you’d need to talk to your web folks about.

25 And speaking of web folks….You may have noticed some things in this presentation that would mean you have to talk to a web developer in your unit. While you won’t need to talk to them about javascript, you will need to talk to them about doing some specific technical things in order to help improve your site’s SEO.

Developers will need to be the ones to put the canonical URL in the metadata for your site. They will also be able to set up 301 redirects for any non-canonical URLs.

If you’re using a CMS like Drupal or Wordpress, your developers can make sure that you’re able to write content that will produce a good URL, will give you the ability to write your metadata title and descriptions, and always prompt you to include alt tags for your images.

If you decide to use schema tags, your developers will be able to help you figure out which tags to use and implement them.

26 Content contributors also need guidance on how to write the appropriate content for SEO. Image alt tags are another factor that helps determine good SEO. If you’re unfamiliar with alt tags, they are the metadata that describe the images on your site.

Using the right mix of keywords and especially their synonyms has become even more important for SEO on google.com. Backlinko suggests that these words appear in the first 100 words of your content.

Write meaningful page titles and include keywords in your meta description. If your content contributors have any input on your URLs, make sure they understand that, for example, the full title of a news article should not be the URL. URLs should be kept short for optimal SEO.

And for anyone in your unit who is preparing a PDF that will be downloadable, keep in mind that these documents show up in search. Writing good, complete PDF titles will also help your visitors understand what the document is about.

27 Much of what you can do to improve your SEO will also help your site’s accessibility.

The University currently has an accessibility initiative underway, led by OIT and the Disability Resource Center. I’m sure you’ll be hearing more about that later this year. But if you’re not already working to make your sites accessible, now would be a good time to start.

28 There are a large number of tools that can be used on your site to help you see how well you’re doing with SEO. For easy to read and interpret SEO issues and how to resolve them, I think SEO Site Checkup does a nice job.

I just ran this tool on the Twin Cities homesite last week after we had done work to improve accessibility. Our score a month ago was 77. The work we did related to accessibility brought our score up to 98, with only 2 remaining failed checks that we’re in the process of fixing.

For folks who are serious about SEO, MozPro is a sophisticated tool that gives you more in-depth information about your site’s SEO performance.

Very recently, Backlinko published a list of almost 200 SEO tools. The list is filtered, so you can choose the type of tool that might address your specific need, like content optimization or keyword research. It’s also filterable by free and paid tools.

29 I’ve already mentioned Backlinko and Moz as resources for SEO.

A few others you might want to check out are neilpatel.com and the quicksprout blog, which is also by Neil Patel, and searchengineland.

I also want to put in a plug for the blog on the new University Relations website. You can subscribe to the blog to receive updates every time we post something new. This presentation will be available there, as well.

30 I know this is a lot of information and it only touches on some of the things that are important for SEO.

It can seem daunting, but if you take it one step at a time, maybe tackling one specific aspect of SEO a week, you’re bound to see results.

By the way, there are lots of great SEO checklists out there and the resources I mentioned have several, so check them out.

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