During migration and beyond: Best Practices with using Metadata on web pages.

Statement of Policy / Statement of Best Practice

• Returning to the fundamental metadata inclusion of keywords and descriptions will make an immediate and positive impact on search engine results, based upon observations over the years since Google announced that it would no longer crawl for data in keyword meta tags on web pages.

  By maintaining both keywords and descriptions in all pages on multiple client sites, their presence adds positive points by the search engines leading to higher placement in the return results, even Google!

  Higher placements in search engine result listings are achieved by taking advantage of having positive points that add up via Search Engine Optimization mechanisms, including having hyphenated URLs using keywords, and using page descriptions and page content keywords in the metadata of each page.

Status

• As of January 2024, many of Miami’s web pages lack metadata descriptions and keywords in most cases, and these elements are helpful in providing the web with readily accessible information for every web page. When it comes to search engines and the results provided based upon key search terms, higher placement on the list is likely due to these types of search engine optimization mechanisms.

Populate page metadata

• When a new page is created or you are reviewing existing pages, make sure to populate the META descriptions, and keywords.

  If a page has a URL that is truncated or shortened, replace the URL with a hyphenated keyword option. Pre-existing pages will require a server redirect if the original URL is edited.

  Some examples:

Uniform Resource Locators

• URLS: keywords separated by hyphens is a mechanism where points can be gained.

  If a URL is titled “admission-policy.html” the page will gain points over a page titled instead with shortened words as in “ad-pol.html”.

Page Descriptions

• Descriptions: a sentence that describes the main focus of the content will add positive points that add up for higher placement in search returns.
  Example from first year students apply page: “Prepare for your exciting college journey and apply as a first-year student to Miami. See the requirements and resources to start your application.”

Page Keywords 

• Keywords: It could be as simple as including the words that are a part of the hyphenated URL to start with, then add several other words that would also be relevant to the topic of the page. Stay away from multi-word phrases, but stick to single-word options. Stay below 150 characters in the field for the description.

• Do not repeat any keyword in the metadata area as this will cause a negative reaction from the indexing agents, so just make sure that the keywords will only appear in the metadata section only once.

Analogy

• If web page content can be thought of as the “mash” in the distilling process, the “still” separates elements from within the “mash” (alcohol) and separates that for collection. The alcohol represents a singular component of the mash that is presented to the user.

  From the overall message of web content the keywords can be “distilled” to small, singular elements that are important parts of the overall message. For a page that contains Admissions content for first year students, some unique keywords could be “miami university, undergraduate admissions, undergraduate, first year, first-year, foundation year” where as a page describing transfer student admissions, could be very similar, but would contain the content words of differentiation “miami university, transfering students, transferring, transfer admission, transfer students”. 

Source

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Related Documents, Forms, and Tools 

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Revision History

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