6 tips for SEO

Providing useful, up-to-date and qualitative content for your target audience = an absolute must 

How do you do this? 

• Clearly keep in mind who your target audience is and what they visit the website for. Think outside-in. 
• Provide current and useful content, focus on the future. 
• Provide content pages that fully answer a search query. 
• Don't get lost in archives or records of past activities. 
• Your website is not an archive for internal administration! 
• Update pages instead of creating new ones all the time.
  

What do you need?

• Logical navigation, easy to use 
• Clear overview 
• Easy to complete top tasks 
• Good web editing 
• Up-to-date, solid content 

How do you do this? 

• Stick to one system of navigation 
• Maximum of 7 items in one navigation level. At the first level a maximum 5 to 6 is better 
• Focus on the top task for each web page, and avoid information overload 
• Don't be afraid of some white space, it makes you feel calm
  

‘As short as possible, but as long as necessary.’ – Online texts don’t always have to be short! 

How do you do this? 

• For a longer text, a good structure is especially important: title and sub-titles, one idea per paragraph, important words in bold, bulleted lists, etc. 
• Provide the info needed to complete the top task on each web page 
• Make a distinction between transition pages (functional) and landing pages (content). 
• Good landing pages (content pages) should be over 1500 words 
• Use good web copy to give the most complete answer to a visitor’s query
  

What are the top tasks of my website and which words or phrases do potential visitors use to find info?

How do you do this?

• Determine the most important search term for which you want to be found 
• Think of synonyms and other variations 
• Using all of these keywords and other entities, rewrite your pages. Make sure that the text stays logical and readable
  

Links = sign for Google that a web page is interesting.

How do you do this?

Build a links policy, that gives you links on many different, relevant, qualitative websites based on your important keywords.

​​ What do you need?

​​ ​ ​ ​​ ​ ​ Page title and page meta description are both important elements for search engine optimisation.

• Page title is the title that is displayed in Google search results and in the tab of your browser. 
• Page meta description appears as a description under the page title, if it is filled in.

​ ​​ ​ ​ How do you do this?

• The page title is constructed automatically, based on: ‘Header 1 of the page | Navigation title of the homepage | University of Antwerp’ 
• The page meta description can be added via the web part 'MetaText' in the Hidden section. In this web part you can also add meta keywords: these are especially useful for the internal search function.