SEO Site Structures

Site Map and Hierarchies

If you have created a web site for your unit or program, you may already have created a site map. This is a visual tool to outline the contents of a site by the page relationships and directories.

You can create a site map for search engine optimization with a text file or XML site map. This assists the web crawl in locating each page and their relationship to one another. A site map will increase your SERP in serving the information in the way you designed the pages.

If your sitemap includes only web page URLs, you can provide Google with a simple text file that contains one URL per line. For example:

http://www.example.com/file1.html
http://www.example.com/file2.html

Guidelines for text file sitemaps

• Encode your file using UTF-8 encoding.
• Your text file should contain nothing but the list of URLs.
• You can name the text file anything you wish, provided it has a .txt extension (for instance, sitemap.txt).

XML Site Maps

Search indexes use your XML site map to understand page relationships.

• Objective: Use xml sitemaps to serve a natural page hierarchy.
• News: https://yoast.com/what-is-an-xml-sitemap-and-why-should-you-have-one/

URL Naming and Friendly URLs

Your URLs are powerful tools for search engine optimization. Naming a file for file structure should not be an afterthought, but also take into consideration your page’s keywords.

• Objective: Use keywords within a file name so the words are found within URLs.
• News:
• Do: Use keywords thoughtfully in your file names.
• Don't: Use generic words.

Javascript in SEO

If Google struggles crawling the JavaScript at all, it won’t see the page completely and could hurt rankings. In essence, a Googlebot crawls the pages as a headless browser but requires the indexer to actually render and index the content. Requiring JavaScript to be rendered in order to find links to key pages can make crawling inefficient.

It is believed that content visually hidden as tabbed content may carry less weight than content visually seen on the page.Do: Use progressively enhanced JavaScript when possible. Progressively enhanced JavaScript in essence makes the page content load even when JavaScript fails.

• Do: Test Pageload time to identify which elements are slowing down your page. Page load time is crucial for mobile-first indexing.
• Do: Change from tabs to content navigation, where all the content seems to live directly on the page and is styled to simulate the feeling of tabs without truly being tabs. As it hyperlinks to separately built pages.
• Don’t: Use # parameters. There are also URLS that do not follow best practice for parameters.These include any URL with a # (hash) fragment.These are not seen as true URLS to search engines, and instead seen as a type of “stop character” because historically these are used for page text anchors instead of new URLS. Any content that is generated using this format should be considered non-indexable. A better version would be to use PushState or accepted parameters such as “?”.

Canonical Tags Pages

If you have duplicate content on your website that lives on multiple pages, one way to solve that is to add a canonical tag on one of the pages. A canonical tag (“rel canonical”) is a way of telling search engines that a specific URL represents the master copy of a page. The canonical tag tells search engines which version of a URL you want to search engines to index and display in search. The lack of canonical tags and the presence of duplicate content is penalized by Google.

Sample tag:

<link rel = “canonical” href= “URL of the page you identified as the main content owner”/>

Robots and No-follow Tags

If you don’t specify a robot meta tag, search engines will obey the default index,follow command. However, there could be reasons you want to change the robot meta tag to influence the behavior of search engine crawling and indexing.

Here are a few common robot meta tags:

• noindex – Prevents the page from being indexed.
• nofollow – Prevents Googlebot from following links from this page.
• nosnippet – Prevents a text snippet or video preview from being shown in the search results. For video, a static image could be shown instead.
• noarchive – Prevents Google from showing the Cached link for a page.
• unavailable_after:[date] – Allows you to specify the exact time and date you want to stop crawling and indexing of this page.

Scenarios:

• Reader Comments: You might input the “nofollow” command, for instance, if your web page has a comments section. Since you can’t control which links are posted by readers in the comments section (which could be off-topic to your page’s content), it might be smart to tell search engines not to follow those links.

Redirect URLS for SEO

Redirects can confuse searches. A simple rule to follow is in order to treat a 404 error, create a 1-to-1 redirect, preferably a 301 redirect, which tells the search engines the page has permanently moved to the new destination URL.

404 errors impact a website performance

• For example: If a page had a lot of traffic and now it’s 404’ing, Google is going to take that out of the index if you don’t redirect it to its new location. Since that page has been performing well, you’re going to lose the benefits of it if you don’t redirect. Watch out for URL redirect chains from to B then from B to C, go directly from A to C.

Semantic Markup

• Using semantic markup appropriately allows the users of assistive technologies to detect the sections (or subjects) covered on the page, understand different sections of related content and navigate quickly to any specific section. It allows search engines to detect the page’s main topics.
• Tables are not accessible. Content in a table layout, while linear, doesn’t always make sense when reading left-to-right and top-to-bottom by assistive technology.
• Do: Use appropriate HTML elements to structure a page and markup content.
  • Only use tables for tabular data.
• Don’t: Use <div> when a more appropriate element is available, such as a <header>, <footer>, <nav>, <main>, or <section>.
• Don’t: Use tables for web page layouts.

Site Speed matters for SEO

Site load time is a crucial element to Google ranking algorithm. While we can’t control all aspects of what makes a site sluggish, here are some things to keep in check.

• Do: Leverage browser caching: Page load times can be significantly improved by asking visitors to save and reuse the files included in your website.
  • It reduces page load times for repeat visitors, particularly effective on websites where users regularly re-visit the same areas of the website.
  • General guidelines for setting expiries:
  • Truly static content (global CSS styles, logos, etc.) – access plus 1 year.
  • Everything else – access plus one week.
• Do: Optimize images for file size: Serving appropriately sized images can save many bytes of data and improve the performance of your webpage, especially on low-powered (eg: mobile) devices. Use a tool like https://kraken.io/web-interface
• Do: Enable GZIP Compression: Reduce the size of files sent from your server to increase the speed to which they are transferred to the browser. GZIP compression is enabled server-side, and allows for further reduction in the size of your HTML, stylesheets and JavaScript files.
  • To check if GZIP compression is enabled on your site, simply use the free Check GZIP compression tool.
• Do: Minimize redirects. Minimizing HTTP redirects from one URL to another cuts out additional wait time for users.
• Do: Defer parsing of JavaScript: In order to load a page, the browser must parse the contents of all <script> tags, which adds additional time to the page load. By minimizing the amount of JavaScript needed to render the page, and deferring parsing of unneeded JavaScript until it needs to be executed, you can reduce the initial load time of your page.

Mobile Optimization improves SEO

As more people embrace mobile technology and smaller devices, search engines like Google are prioritizing mobile-optimized sites in search engine results. Optimize your site for mobile views and usage.

Role Considerations

Site strategists should create a business case for why mobile is important to certain audiences. Developers should be testing sites for mobile optimization and accessibility.

Audience Considerations

Capture usage trends by device from Google Analytics. Report year-over-year on what kind growth mobile visits shows.

Prospective Students

Are active on mobile devices more than any other audiences. Prospective students use mobile devices to perform research. However, due to lack of adoption by most college web sites, they transfer application and function utility to desktop use.

Best Practices

Set a plan together to make sure your experience is mobile.

Mobile Search Results (Visual Examples)

Search results appear different from desktop and mobile because Google looks to serve mobile-optimized pages to mobile searchers.

Do’s

• DO: Use a responsive grid for page structure for mobile-optimization.
• DO: Consider your audience visit statistics as you plan to make your web site mobile responsive.
• DO: Test your site in Google Mobile Console: https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly.
• DO: Make your site mobile-responsive to be able to attract more views in mobile searches.

Don’ts

• DON’T: Ignore the meta description fields.
• DON’T: Add too much in your meta title so users can’t see the name of the university.