Market & Strategic Communications - University Web Guide

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Further Enquiries

Online Media
Marketing & Strategic Communications
The University of Adelaide
SA 5005 Australia
Email

Telephone: +61 8 8303 7511
Facsimile: +61 8 8303 4829

Metadata and Searchability

When pages are unable to be found by a search engine, it doesn't automatically mean that the search engine is broken or outdated. It could be that you need to optimise your pages for search engines, and to maximise their 'searchability' within the University website.

How Search Engines Work

To help people find your website, a search engine interprets what your site is about. A search engine may collect information in three ways:

A search engine may look at the text on your page, called the body text. It scans your page and identifies important words (called keywords), from which it determines the subject of your page. Therefore on your main page, it pays to be very clear about what you're saying and it is helpful to always have at least 50 keywords on the page.
Search engines will also look at the document properties of other files linked to a site, such as Word or PDF documents. This information may include titles, authors, descriptions, keywords and copyright information. See the Metadata (PDF/Word) page for more information.
Finally, a search engine may look at the coding behind your page - the page source code. The most important things in the page source are the meta tags and title tag. Meta tags are elements that record information about the current page. You type in this information as metadata, which includes page title, keywords, two-sentence description and author (or creator). Meta tags can also be used to give information to the server.

Adding Metadata to the Page Source Code

You can have a look at the page source code of any webpage in the following way. If you're using either Netscape or Internet Explorer, right click your mouse anywhere on the page and select View Source from the pop-up menu. This will bring up a new window showing the page source code.

The industry standards for metadata are the Education Network Australia and Dublin Core ("DC.").

A search engine may compare your metadata to your body text to determine the subject of your site. You should use keywords in your links, page title and description of your site.

The Page Title

The page title is in the top left corner of the browser and is not the heading in the body text.

Page title

When viewing the page source code, it is the text that appears between the opening and closing <TITLE> tags in the <HEAD>:

<head>

<title>
University Web Guide | Metadata and Searchability </title>

When editing the file sitetitle.html and meta.html (see 'Metadata in TMS sites' below), the "Name of Website" and "DC.TITLE" meta attribute should contain the same content, i.e. if the name of the website in sitetitle.html is 'University Web Guide', the meta title tag in meta.html should read <metatype="DC.TITLE" content="University Web Guide".

The H1 (Heading 1 or top level heading) tag of the content files (such as index.html) are also used to give more specific information about the page you are looking at. H1 tags are used to style the title of the page, for example on this page the title of the page is 'Metadata and Searchability'. Our web templates contain code to tell the page title to appear with the name of the site and the text of the H1, i.e. 'University Web Guide | Metadata and Searchability'.

By the time the content of sitetitle.html and the H1 are included as a single string, this title contains 50 characters. The W3C recommendation for site titles is 64 characters or less (Google will only display 66 characters max. for a snippet title anyway). Keep titles short by using ampersand '&' instead of 'and', and eliminate characters such as 'The' if not necessary.

Example:

The School of Agriculture and Wine should be:

<title>School of Agriculture & Wine</title>

Metadata in TMS Sites

The home page of each TMS site has metadata associated with it. This metadata is included from two files. The first of these contains generic information that should appear on all University of Adelaide sites and is maintained by Online Media.

The content of this centrally stored file contains the following:

<p><meta name="DC.PUBLISHER" content="The University of Adelaide">
<meta name="DC.RIGHTS" content="Copyright 
The University of Adelaide">
<meta name="DC.RIGHTS" content="http://www.adelaide.edu.au/copyright.html">
<meta name="DC.LANGUAGE" scheme="RFC1766" content="en">
<meta name="DC.DATE.MODIFIED" scheme="ISO8601" content="
">
<meta name="DC.FORMAT" scheme="IMT" content="text/html">
<meta name="RATING" content="General">
<meta name="CLASSIFICATION" content="Education">

The second file is stored within the site in the includes/meta.html file. It contains information specific to the site and should be customised to suit the requirements of the site. The following example is the recommended format for a school website:

Please use this as an example only. You should use data which is specific to your site. It is better to leave the 'includes/meta.html file' blank rather than to use information which is too generic or just copied from another website.

For assistance in adding metadata to your website, please contact the Online Media team.