Adding new content to the website
To request a new web page, make a request to the web team through UniSC connect.
Attach final content in a Word document along with any preferred imagery as separate attachments.
The M&C website team will review the content to ascertain an appropriate location for the content in the structure of the website.
A page will be created with an appropriate page title - then the content can be added to the page by the web editor in your work area.
At this point, you have two options
- Add the content yourself – Web editors can populate the new page within their work area.
- Have the web team build it for you – If you’d prefer, the web team can add the content and set up the page.
Simply note this in your UniSC connect request.
Pasting text into Umbraco (plain text only)
When adding text to your new page, to keep content consistent and avoid hidden formatting or extra code in the Rich Text Editor (RTE), it’s best practice to always paste content as plain text. This helps keep the editing process more efficient and reduces the need for rework later.
How to do it
Option 1 (recommended): Keyboard shortcut
- Click in the editor
- Paste using:
- Windows: Ctrl + Shift + V
- Mac: Cmd + Shift + V
Option 2: Right-click paste
- Click in the top-left of the editor area (important)
- Right-click
- Select “Paste as plain text”
- Paste your content
Using plain text paste helps keep content clean, consistent, and avoids extra cleanup work later in the workflow.
Metadata
Metadata are keywords that search functions use to identify your web page. All pages in Umbraco include a metadata tab. This tab contains properties like keywords, content summary, review date, and others as applicable to each document type. Metadata improves the search visibility of your webpage on the UniSC website.
Google will use the text in the description field in their search results and so does our own site search, so it is very important that your page description is succinct and describes the page accurately.
- Keywords: Think carefully about your keywords – include words that describe your content but may not actually be used anywhere in the text. Different visitors will use different search terms, don't let your pages become invisible.
- Description: Enter a short 1-2 sentence description about what visitors can find on the web page. This will form the page summary in search results.
- Review date: The review date is normally set to 6 months in advance on all new web pages unless you have a reason to want to see the page before then - maybe you know that some of the content will need updating in, say, 2 months, in which case set the date accordingly. If you are reviewing an existing web page remember to update the review date before saving and sending to publish. The maximum date you can set a review date is 6 months, however, you can pick a date anytime in between that suits you.
Boosting search results
Boosting helps to surface more relevant content for a given search term - without boosting, a page mentioning 'science' multiple times may rank higher than the Bachelor of Science page, even though the program page is likely a better result. Fields are given a relevance boost, in this order:
- page name and keywords are boosted 5x
- description and main content are boosted 3x
- tags are boosted 2x
Accurate keywords and a concise description contribute to a more robust and reliable search index, which means better results for users. Adding variations of the same keyword won't influence the search results. Much like off-site SEO, write accessible content for users to read. This will have the best impact on search result relevance.
Featured search terms
The website team can set results as featured terms to always return in the first position, with additional visual priority. This is useful for promoting particular pages that would otherwise not be returned for a given search, or may be part of a large result set and potentially overlooked. For example, 'science' returns the study area page as a featured result. Contact the website team for more information.