Design for Web Search Engines

When users conduct Web searches, they are presented with a list of "hits" which usually contain a title link, the first words of text on the page or a list of keywords. The following standards ensure that JMU Web pages are handled accurately by Internet search engines.

Standards

  • The page title on departmental home pages shall include "James Madison University" or "JMU" in addition to the department or office name.
  • Subsequent pages within the department shall be clearly titled according to the content on each page.

Guidelines

  • A META tag should be used in the HTML head of the document.

 

META tag recommendations

Note: these are only general recommendations, you'll need to provide additional text specific to your page's content .

 

<META NAME="Keywords"        CONTENT=" James Madison University, JMU, Madison College, James Madison, Madison, Dukes, Virginia, Harrisonburg, Shenandoah, Rockingham, college, colleges, university, universities, school, schools, education, higher education ">

 

Keywords: a comma-separated list of words logically related to the content of your document (think what you would enter into a key word search to locate this document).

 

Points to keep in mind:

- the comma followed by a space between each word is intentional

- do not repeat your keywords

- make sure the whole tag from and including "<" to ">" is less than 1024 characters

- repeating your keywords after your page's title in the <TITLE> tag helps as well

 

<META NAME="Description"    CONTENT="University Relations comprises various departments whose focus is on internal and external relations. Check the list of our departments and offices.">

 

Description: specifies an alternate excerpt (description) of a page.