Vanguard University of Southern California

How do I get my page to appear higher on search engines?

Have you updated your meta tags?  This is usually the number 1 search criteria at which search engines look.  Meta Tags are hidden values embedded in web pages that are NOT typically visible to people but are visible to search engines.  You can see meta tags if you open a web page and click View – Source from the menu of your browser.  View - Source  will open a text document that will look like it contains a bunch of gobblety-gook.  Have no fear the gobblety-gook can not hurt you, just scroll  through the document and find a line the looks like this:

<meta type= "keywords" ...>

Fortunately you don't need to know this code in order to work with Meta-tags because our tools make it easy.  So how do you update your meta tags? 

  1. Using the Ektron editor, edit your home page.
  2. Hit the Metatags button in the upper left corner of the editor. 
  3. A window will pop up. 
  4. Find the title, keywords, and description boxes.
  5. Add a good description and keywords set for your home page. 
  6. Keywords are any words related to your subject matter seperated by commas.  For example in EEC your tags might be: EEC, early, child, childhood, ed, education, certificate, early childhood education, vanguard, univerisity, professional, childcare, training.
  7. Title and Description should be self-explanatory
  8. Hit the Save icon when you are done.

After you edit your home page meta-tags you will want to add meta tags for the rest of your sub pages – however, again we have made things easier.  Each subpage in your folder is smart.  It knows how to steal meta-tags from your home page, so if you update your home page meta-tags then you are also updating generally for all your pages.  Of course you will want to give each page it's own identity, so add additional information for each page in the meta-tags. 

For example, pretend you are working in the EEC folder and you already updated the home page meta tags.  In the “book ordering” page for EEC you only need to add “book, ordering” to the keywords because the other keywords from the EEC home page will be automatically added to the page when it is created.