Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

More than 60% of visitors to our website arrive following a search (mainly Google). Therefore, it is important that your content is easy for search engines to use.

SEO is strongly linked to good content and to web accessibility and usability. Some SEO is taken care of for you by our t4 infrastructure:

  • the overall structure of our site and the power of the domain gla.ac.uk
  • the usability of desktop, tablet and mobile versions of our web visual identity
  • the accessibility and page download speed of our t4 content types (templates)

SEO responsibilities of a web publisher

You must also ensure that the content you publish (using our content types) is maximised for SEO

Search terms

Try to use the terms you expect those searching for your content to use. And, if appropriate, use those terms in headings. 

Make your content accessible

Using good accessibility techniques give your content a boost in search engine rankings:

  • Use descriptive links
  • Provide alernative text for images: the alt text you supply gets included in Google's crawl of our site
  • Video transcripts are also crawled: this means text within these can be matched with search terms

Find out more: Accessibility

Write for the web

Put your key content first: the higher a search term appears on a page, the higher it will be ranked. Use headings appropriately to highlight what your content is about. And, use clear, understandable language: reading age is also used as a factor in search rankings. 

Find out more: Writing for the web

User experience

Focusing on the end user of your content will also help your rankings in search engines. 

Find out more: UX

Maximise page download speed

Make sure that images and pdf's are uploaded to the t4 media library at the smallest usable file size. This will help increase page download time and positively impact on search engine rankings. 

Keep your content up to date 

Google ranks freshness of content: if you keep your pages up to date and relevant they are more likely to rank highly. This ties in with our top tip: Don't publish more than you can maintain.

Following good practice benefits the site as a whole and provides a boost to our overall rankings in searches, poor practice has a detrimental effect on all.

The algorithms external search engines use to rank content are complex, closely guarded and forever changing.