If your page/site is not turning up as you believe it should in PSU search results when using appropriate search terms, you may need to modify your page/site to improve how it is indexed.
PSU search weights the following webpage components when evaluating how to index a given page. Accordingly, you can improve your page/site's position in search results most effectively by providing good page titles and description and keywords meta tags. Note that making these improvements will improve your page/site's ranking in other search indexes as well.
- Title Tag (weight: 9/10, high relevance)
- Make sure you have provided a descriptive and unique title for your page in the <title> tag. Using the same title for every page on your site doesn't help the search engine distinguish between them. Note that the page title will be the title listed in PSU search results.
- Description Meta Tag (weight: 7/10, high relevance)
- Make sure you have provided a succinct description for your page (eg, <meta name="description" content="Your page description here.">). Using the same description for every page on your site doesn't help the search engine distinguish between them. Note that the page description will be the first detail listed under the title in PSU search results.
- Keywords Meta Tag (weight: 7/10, high relevance)
- Make sure you have provided accurate key words for your page (eg, <meta name="keywords" content="your, key, words, here">). Using the same keywords for every page on your site doesn't help the search engine distinguish between them.
- Body Text (weight: 5/10, medium relevance)
- Clearly, the body of your page should contain appropriate information for its purpose, aligned with the title, description and keywords you have provided.
- Img Tag Alt Text (weight: 3/10, low relevance)
- Providing extensive alt text in img tags is not highly effective for positioning your page in PSU search results. However, using img alt parameters properly is important for general website accessibility. See www.htmlhelp.com/feature/art3.htm for good practices for img alt text.
- URL (weight: 1/10, low relevance)
- There are many considerations for constructing proper webpage addresses—aka, uniform resource locators (URLs) or uniform resource identifiers (URIs). The URI of your page/site will not play a large part in determining its placement in search results. In general, short, human-understandable names for domains, website directories and webpages are appropriate.
Check out these resources for good practices on preparing pages/sites for search indexing:
