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Tips for Making Search-Friendly Pages

Page address: http://www.mnsu.edu/its/web/searchfriendly.html
  • Whenever possible, keep the window title, header title, and breadcumb title the same in the master.php file. If the header and the breadcrumbs differ in content, it will be more difficult to index the page the way you want it.
  • Do not use the same title on every page on your website. The search engine might think that all your pages are the same, so your pages might not get indexed.
  • Read the page. Now without any pre-knowledge about how you found the page, describe it in four or five words using only words on the page. If what you write is not what you'd search for on a search engine, you're probably missing your target.
  • Keep the page an "index page" with only links to other pages, or make it an "information page" where information and links to other like-minded pages are displayed.
  • Use heading tags for sub-titles on pages. Search engines put more attention on text inside heading tags. Use one <h2> tag on every page with the most relevant keywords. Also make use of other head tags such as <h3>, <h4>, etc., to support the content of <h2>.

Example: (tags spelled out for demonstration)

<h2>Baseball<h2>

<h3>Baseball Scores<h3>

<p>Information about baseball scores.<p>

<h3>Baseball Roster<h3>

<p>Information about baseball roster.<p>