Writing for Web and SEO

The use of headings will make it easier for users to quickly identify different information within your copy.

When writing subheads, ensure they are:

• Informative and direct. The information following the subhead should be exactly what the user would expect.
• A maximum of one line long – preferably one to five words.
• In sentence case. Only the first word should be capitalized.

When linking to another webpage, follow these rules:

• Never use the words “click here.”
• When referring to another page on the site, the copy should link to that page. All applicants should be familiar with the admission requirements.
• Avoid linking entire sentences. Instead, link the copy describing the link location. SAIT offers many dining options.
• Do not link punctuation marks.
• Do not include http:// or www. within the copy: sait.ca, not www.sait.ca.
• Links to documents and external websites should always open in a new browser window or tab.
• When including external links, check that the content is acceptable and regularly monitor that it remains so.
• Use lowercase for web addresses unless capitalization is part of the proper address.
• Never link a heading or subheading.
• Link emails, but include the address written out as well. For more information contact site.feedback@sait.ca. 

Use numbered lists when the order of items is important (for example, steps to complete an application.)

In all other instances, use bulleted lists.

Content contributors do not need to choose different font styles for their copy — this is set automatically within the CMS.

Bold font should only be used to highlight important information within paragraph text. You do not need to bold a heading. This will happen automatically when selecting your header style.

Italics should only be used for proper titles of books, periodicals, including newspapers, journals and magazines, plays, movies, long musical works, songs, albums, television and radio shows, works of visual art, and names of ships and aircraft. Foreign words that are not part of the English language should also be in italic:

"The scientific name for the rainbow trout is Oncorhynchus mykiss."

An exception is alma mater.

Underlined text should never be used online unless the text is a link. When creating links in your text, the copy will underline automatically.

It’s best practice to do some keyword research when seeking to improve search rankings for your page(s). Start by documenting keywords and phrases you believe your content relates to, then utilize a keyword planner to help you refine and narrow down those keywords. Keyword planners help you flesh out related keywords and phrases as well as offer data on monthly search volumes for those keywords.

Popular keyword tools include:

• Google Keyword Planner (you’ll need a Google Ads account to access, but you don’t have to spend any money to create the account.)
• Moz Keyword Explorer
• AnswerthePublic
• aHrefs (the Digital Strategy team has a paid subscription to this tool. See analytics and reporting for details.) 

An effective tactic to improve search rankings is to choose keywords and phrases that have high monthly search volume, but low to medium competition.

Once you’ve identified these keywords and phrases, use them strategically throughout your content, including your page name/title, meta descriptions/summary, headers, body copy formatting, links and images. Don’t overuse these words – bots can tell when you’re “stuffing” your content with keywords.

You can also add keywords in the Keywords field (on the metadata tab) on your pages. While these will have no impact on external searches like Google, they will influence internal search results (which is an ever-increasing method for users to find information within sait.ca.)

Does the competitor use key phrases in their headers? How are they using linked text and alt text? Try to determine what they’re doing well and make modifications to your page to try and outrank them.

The title of your page should be a concise and accurate description of the content within. This is your first opportunity to rank for the topic you want to be known for.

Be practical – being too creative, abstract or overly wordy won’t impress Google, nor is it likely to be what users are searching for when looking for related information. For example, Contact the School of Business is stronger than Contact Us.

Try to keep your page title to a maximum of 70 characters, otherwise, it may be cut off on the search results page.

The page title will appear in:

• search engine results,
• the browser bar tab
• and in social networks.

The display name on your page becomes the H1 and will appear at the top of the page itself as well as in internal search results. (Please note, on basic pages, there's a title field within the Hero section that becomes the H1 instead.)

The page name (which will only appear for contributors when they are creating a new page) forms the URL of the live page. These should be in lower-kabob-case (page-name-url) with no special characters or spaces.

Both the title and display name can be the same if you wish. Most page titles on Google’s first page contain keywords that are a partial or exact match to the user’s search query.

Every page within your website should also have a unique title and page name - pages with very similar titles causes user and search engine confusion.

Institutional acronyms are meaningless to the general public.

If using acronyms, spell them out in their first instance: 

Applied Research and Innovation Services (ARIS) involves students in industry-based, applied-research projects through practicum placements, capstone projects and as student research assistants.

Both your description and summary should be a short sentence or two describing the information the user will find on the page – and is yet another opportunity to strategically incorporate keywords. It should be a maximum of 160 characters or less.

Your meta description (located on the metadata tab of your page) will often be the copy served up on search results under the title of your page, or what accompanies the page title on social links.

However, in some instances, Google will dive further into the content of your page to grab the information it serves up under your page title.

Your page summary is what accompanies your page on cards and other areas across sait.ca. If appropriate, you can use the same copy for the meta description and summary of your page.

Headers are much like chapter titles and should speak to the information beneath them. Headings are used to provide clarity to a page and help users quickly scan content to find what they’re looking for.

Search engines use headers to understand the page’s structure and topic. There are six heading levels h1-h6 – and they should always be logically structured.

Pages should only contain one h1 (which is the display name field), followed by h2’s with h3’s for sub-sections. H2s in your content are recommended, but further heads are optional.

You should never skip a heading level! Improper use of headings confuses search engines and will work against you.

Heading 2

Heading 3

Heading 4

Heading 5

Heading 6

Google likes a speedy site and penalizes those that are slow or offer a horrible mobile experience. The unoptimized image is huge – saving your photos for web will help keep file sizes to a minimum and site speeds faster as a result.

Also, don’t forget to include an alt tag – or description of the image. Its purpose is to provide the visually impaired with a description of the image as well as offers another opportunity for SEO. This field is especially valuable if the copy you’re working with makes it difficult to capture some keywords or phrases that didn’t naturally fit in elsewhere.

For example, English Language Foundations as the linked text is stronger than ELF.

Never (ever) use 'click here'.

Many of these crawlers take looking for duplicates very seriously.

To the robots, at least, duplicate content looks like you purposefully copied material to increase your ranking.

To find out if you have any duplicate titles, meta descriptions, header tags or URLs, run an SEO audit on your assigned pages frequently. You can use free SEO tools through moz.com to help easily identify these issues. Then, review and clean up those duplicates quickly so sait.ca does not get penalized.

The Digital Strategy team works to avoid duplicated content across sait.ca, which is why moving your pages through workflow is important.