Critical: Create quality, trustworthy, informative, authoritative and well organized content.
Follow Google’s Search Essentials to improve rankings on search engines. This task is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and includes improving content displayed about us in generative search results and AI Chat bots. With the increase in AI chat interfaces, we may see a reduction in visitors who click on links to visit our actual website because they are able to read it in these new interfaces. We need to ensure our audience gets our messaging, whether they read it on our website or another interface.
- Use standard compliant code that is well formatted with headings.
- Use keywords, phrases and terms that you believe your visitors will be searching for, especially in headers (tagged with h1-h6 HTML)
- If the content entry form has a field for a summary or meta description be sure to fill it in with keywords and phrases as well. Check out Google’s recommendations for Meta descriptions.
- Adhere to accessibility guidelines. Accessibility features improve the content for assistive devices which have many similarities to how they understand the content as the search engine bots.
- Write contextual alternate text for images using keywords and phrases, when possible.
- Use contextual links, using keywords and phrases, when possible.
- Use descriptive file names, using keywords and phrases, when possible.
- Use a unique HTML Title tag (usually generated by the Title field on your page) for each page on the site. Do not have more than one page with the same title.
- Think about your typical desired website visitor and be sure to answer the questions they are looking for.
- Ask affiliated sites to link to you. Links from other websites to your website act like votes of confidence. Make sure you link every reference from your site to your related units within the University and ask them to do the same.
- Cross link between pages on your site. Provide more links to the most important content.
- Update the content on your site often.
- Create or update Wikipedia and Wiki Data entries to improve Google search Knowledge Panels.
- Increase social sharing. Share on social media channels, make it easy to share and encourage sharing.
- Use Artificial Intelligence to help improve your website content.
Being part of the utexas.edu domain name automatically improves rankings. Utexas.edu is considered to be an authoritative brand.
The web team is working in the background to ensure the technical aspects and the usability of the sites are strong for Search Engine Optimization.
Learn More
Learn How Search Engines Work from Google itself in this less than 5 minute video. Update March 2024, read Google’s 200 Ranking Factors: The Complete List from Backlinko. Check out the Beginner’s Guide to SEO from MOZ. Read Fundamentals of SEO and on LinkedIn Learning Improve SEO of Your Website . Protecting and Promoting Your School’s Brand on Google on OHO Interactive.
