Keyword research is easier than it sounds. All you have to do is:

1. Brainstorm words related to your content that people might search for online.
2. Refine your list using a keyword planner, such as:
   • 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
   • SEMRush (the Digital Strategy team has a paid subscription to this tool. See analytics and reporting for details.) 

Choose keywords that have high search volume and low to medium competition.

Once you have your final keywords, use them naturally in your page name/title, meta descriptions/summary, headers, body copy formatting, links and images. Don’t overuse them–bots can tell when you’re “stuffing” your content with keywords.

You can also add them 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 on our site.

Look at pages ranking higher than yours for similar topics. Note how they use keywords in their headers, links, and alt text. Try to determine what they’re doing well and make changes to your own page to try and outrank them.

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.

 Do

• Write a concise, descriptive, and keyword-focused page title.
• Ensure it’s a maximum of 70 characters to prevent it from being cut off in search results.
• Ensure every page has a unique title and page name—similar titles cause user and search engine confusion.

 Don’t

• Don’t be too creative, abstract, or wordy in your title—users and search engines need clarity.
• Don’t use institutional acronyms in the title. If needed, spell out the full name first with the acronym in brackets.
  • For example, “Applied Research and Innovation Services (ARIS)”

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. It may also appear on cards and other areas across sait.ca.

Best practices:

• Write one to two sentences to describe the information on the page (max ~160 characters).
• Include relevant keywords naturally.
• Use the same copy for your meta description and summary, if appropriate.

Think of headers like chapter titles—they organize your content for both users and search engines.

For users, they provide clarity and help people quickly scan content to find what they are looking for.

For search engines, they help crawlers understand the page’s structure and topic.

There are six heading levels—h1 to h6—and they should always be structured in order (never skip a level!).

Heading 1

Heading 2

Heading 3

Heading 4

Heading 5

Heading 6

Pages should only contain one h1 (which is the display name field), followed by h2s and h3s for sub-sections. H2s are recommended, but further headers are optional.

Don’t use institutional acronyms in your headers. If needed, spell out the full name first with the acronym in brackets. For example, “Applied Research and Innovation Services (ARIS)”.

Google likes a speedy site and penalizes those that are slow or offer a poor mobile experience. Images that are not optimized for the web reduce site speed and can hurt rather than help the user experience.

Best practices:

• Always save images for the web to keep file sizes small—read more about uploading images here.
• Add an alt tag that describes the image and includes keywords naturally. This improves accessibility and helps give SEO a boost.

Links help users navigate and search engines understand your content, as well as related content.

Best practices

• Use descriptive link text—never (ever) use ‘click here.’
• Link relevant words or phrases, not entire sentences or headings.
• Always open external links or documents in a new tab.
• Don’t use institutional acronyms in your link text.
  • For example, English Language Foundations as the linked text is stronger than ELF.

To the robots, duplicate content—including titles, meta descriptions, header tags, and URLs—looks like you purposefully copied material to increase your search ranking.

To maintain unique content:

• Run SEO audits on your assigned pages frequently using free tools like moz.com.
• Review and clean up any duplicates quickly.

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