LibGuides Best Practices

How do search engines work?

Automated search engines uses software known as web crawlers that explore the web regularly to find pages to add to an index. A ranking system is then applied to sort through the index and present the most relevant, useful results to the user.

Definitions

Crawling

How a search engine discovers URLs and explores the internet. Search engines crawl websites on their own schedule, so it may take some time for search engines to find your content if it's brand new, or if it's not linked by a lot of different sites.

Indexing

How a search engine understands what the page is about and its relation to other pages on the internet, and how it stores that information in a searchable way.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

The process of increasing the visibility of website pages on search engines in order to attract more relevant traffic. 

Sources: Google Search Central: In-depth guide to how Google Search works; Google: Introducing How Search Works (video)

As you'll notice, many of the same best practices for web accessibility also apply to SEO. Where appropriate, links to relevant pages from the LibGuides Accessibility guide have been provided for additional information, examples, and resources.

Search engines will find the content on their own, but you can take steps to help them understand the content they find. The following practices will improve the indexing of your LibGuide(s) by search engines.

Guide and page titles

• These should be unique, readable, descriptive of the content of the guide, and include what you would consider to be keywords for the guide.
• Search engines are most concerned with the first 65-75 characters so, if your title is longer, consider "front-loading" the title by placing the most important keywords at the beginning.

Guide and page descriptions

• These serve as the primary source for the search result snippet (brief description that appears below the page link on the search results page).
• Search engines prioritize the first 160 characters of the description.
• See: LibGuides Accessibility: Guide & Page Descriptions

Headings

• Structure content within a page by using appropriate headers (i.e., H1, H2, H3, H4, etc.).
• This helps search engines understand what is included on a page and its importance.
• See: LibGuides Accessibility: Heading Levels & Logical Order

When a LibGuide appears on a search results page, there will often one "main" result, followed by a few sub-pages. Search engines decide the relative importance of pages listed, in part, based on the URLs and web hierarchy.

Friendly URLs

• Each guide, each page of the guide, and all sub-pages should have a friendly URL.
• URLs should be human-readable and shorter is better.
• See: LibGuides Accessibility: Friendly URLs

Hierarchy

• Navigation is very important to search engines and the URL indicates a page's relative importance to the site.
• The closer the URL is to the domain level, the more important search engines think it is. The more forward slashes (/) a URL has after the domain (e.g., com, .org., .edu, etc.), the further away it is from domain level.
  • Example:
    • https://guides.lib.uci.edu/libguides-accessibility (1 forward slash = closer)
    • https://guides.lib.uci.edu/libguides-accessibility/friendly-urls (2 forward slashes = further away)

Search engines prioritize what they think are "good sites." If someone immediately clicks "back" when they get to a page, that could be an indication that the content isn't good, or isn't what the user expected based on the page title or URL.

Part of how search engines calculate the relevance of a page is the number of "high quality" links that you have on a page, and how many "high quality" sites link back to your page. The following practices will help you optimize, or improve, the content on your LibGuides.

High quality content

• Well-written content free of spelling and grammar errors.
• Use appropriate headings to create structure.
• Link to other "quality" sources.

Avoid duplicative pages

• Search engines dislike duplicative content.
• If you have certain kinds of standard content that shows up on a lot of different guides, you may want to link to that in a separate guide, rather than reusing that page all the time. Use your own judgement here.

Use contextual links

• The display text for an embedded link should let the user know where the link will take them.
• Links should also be formatted so users can pick them out (don't hide them).
• See: LibGuides Accessibility: Contextual Links

Don't hide/bury content in files or text on images

• Search engines can only see the alt-text of an image or a file name, they can't see the actual image or the contents of the file itself and don't index files or documents you've uploaded.
• If the content is important, include it on the page, rather than in a file that must be downloaded.
• Always use alt-text for images, as that is what will be indexed, or provide the same information conveyed by the image as regular text on the page.
• See: LibGuides Accessibility: Alt-Text for Images