It takes time for the search engines, even our MSU custom search, to find newly created webpages, index, and display on a relevant search entry. We have recommendations for you to assist the search engines in finding your page, and further information about what you can do if it's still not appearing in our MSU Search.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on webpages in the CMS.
If you are concerned with the ranking (the spot in the list where your site appears) for a particular keyword or keyword phrase, take a look at some of the fundamentals and how you can employ them on your pages in the CMS.
- Page title and first paragraph - do your keywords and/or keyword phrases appear there?
- Are you using images where you could be using text? If so, text is crawled by the search engines more thoroughly than alternative text on images.
- Meta title, meta description and meta keywords - these are found in Properties >> Parameters when the page is checked out to you.
- Backlinking - how many other pages within your site link back to this page? How about from other MSU pages? Pages outside the montana.edu domain? All of those links back to that page will increase its authority in the search engines.
- All done? Ask Web & Digital Communications via our web support system to recrawl your website so it will index the new information on the page.
Once these are updated, refined and published it can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks for the page to appear in search results, even with a recrawl request.
Search Features - can you add one while we're waiting it to appear in the regular search results?
Generally we will not add a search feature for a brand new website or page. Allowing search to organically crawl and find the page results in less confusing and more usable search results.
However, if there is a time-sensitive issue and you have already completed the steps above to optimize all the new pages for search, we can add a Search Feature temporarily, for 2 weeks. This will give the page enough time to be indexed and it will begin appearing in search. This request must go through the web support system and be approved by the Director of Web & Digital Communications.