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University Marketing and Communications

Web and SEO best practices

Browse tips and best practices for making your websites and digital spaces more welcoming and usable. For more information on these topics or to request a consultation or training session, contact the digital team.

Writing for the web

Follow these tips to make your website easier for visitors to scan and read, especially on mobile devices.

Keep it brief

Use short sentences, and get to the point quickly. Try to keep paragraphs no longer than 4-5 sentences. Break up text into several paragraphs if needed to make mobile reading easier. Use bullets to break up list-style content.

Scannability matters

Don’t assume visitors will read every word on the page. Most visitors scan pages, paying quick attention to headers, bolded words, links, and buttons, and navigation. If they can quickly find what’s relevant to them, they are much more likely to click, tap, and engage more deeply.

Scannability tips

  • Utilize specific headers and subheaders: Ensure headers and subheaders are crisp (3-5 words), give readers a strong sense of what content lives beneath it, and set up expectations on what users can expect if they engage.
  • Bold key terms (sparingly)
  • Break up content: Use bullets, paragraph breaks, and more to break up long lines of text.
Make it easy to understand

Aim for writing at an eighth-grade reading level. Opt for basic, short words. Avoid jargon and acronyms. Don’t assume any prior knowledge of internal nuances, like our organizational structure, acronyms, abbreviations, or formal or informal titles.

Front-load

Put the most important information first. This practice applies to headers, sentences, and content structure on pages.

Emphasize keywords and searchability

Think about the terms users will search for to find the information on the page and repeat those often. It may seem redundant, but it’s effective. Avoid the impulse to use clever headers and subheads that don’t convey important information.

Follow style rules

Reference the University style guide if you have questions about specific conventions, capitalization, spelling, and more.

Content strategy

Writing for the web and content strategy aren’t the same thing. In short, content strategy is the process of developing, maintaining, and governing content. While this includes writing for the web, there are a lot of other facets that play into content strategy, such as:

  • Content audits
  • Audience and SEO research
  • Audience personas and messaging pillars
  • Content maps and information architectures
  • Key performance indicators (KPIs) and strong calls to action
  • Editorial calendars and maintenance plans
  • Analytics data to gather insights and optimize performance

Content strategy ensures your audience and your goals are at the forefront of everything you write and create. And, it builds guardrails to ensure your website stays relevant, timely, and is meeting the needs of your audience.

Search engine optimization

Search engine optimization is one of the most effective tactics to increase traffic to a website. More than half of web traffic can be coming from search engines–and optimization can help improve those numbers.

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of making sure your content can be crawled and indexed by search engines in a way that will help content rank higher in search results and drive more organic traffic to your site.

Where do you start with SEO?

SEO starts before the content creation begins. Keyword research identifies the most searched questions from the target audience, and can offer insights about topics that might help build bigger audiences.

Once content is on your website, it’s time to start looking for ways to optimize and maximize performance. There are a variety of tools at our disposal to help run reports and identify opportunities to improve performance.

Digital accessibility

Digital accessibility ensures people of all abilities and situations can access our University’s web and digital experiences. This includes those with disabilities (visual, motor-control, auditory, and cognitive), as well as different technical circumstances (limited internet speeds and different browsers, screen sizes, and device types).

Accessibility ladders up to our University’s values of equity and inclusion. It also makes our digital spaces easier for everyone to use. There are legal compliance considerations related to accessibility, too.

To learn more about the University’s efforts to ensure inclusive digital spaces, visit our Digital Accessibility website.

Web analytics

Website analytics provides you with the capability to determine the effectiveness of your digital content, and to discover insights to make changes that can improve performance.

We can help you ensure that you have the proper analytics accounts set up and that they are set up and tracking properly against your strategic goals.

It is important to monitor site traffic and performance to understand what content is working, what content isn’t, and where you have gaps on your site. Analytics enable you to track a variety of user activities on your site, including:

  • Traffic volume and type
  • Geographic location
  • What types of devices and technology they use
  • New vs. returning users
  • Popular pages
  • How long people stay on a website before leaving

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