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 Google’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 Google Search 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 search engine results pages, also known as SERP. The algorithm that delivers the U’s search results is based on the Google Search Appliance 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 Google account. 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 website, 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 URLs. 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.