Quick Reference Style Guide
Style
Be very concise: aim to reduce text by at least 50%
Use plain English.
Frontload headlines, paragraphs, links and lists.
Use short sentences (21 words maximum).
Use short paragraphs (65 words maximum).
Use ‘you’ and ‘we’ whenever appropriate – connection with audience and us.
Format
Don't underline text for emphasis (underlining is reserved for links).
Don't use solid caps, italics or bold for emphasis.
Use capital letters only for:
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initial letter of sentence or heading
name or title of a specific person or entity, e.g. Chief Executive Jane Smith,
Ministry of Social Stability
acronyms and abbreviations, e.g. UNICEF.
Don't capitalise any other words.
Structure
Start every page with a unique, precise, explanatory headline.
Follow with summary, description or key message of the page.
Use frequent subheadings; write them like headlines.
Limit page size to the equivalent of 5 A4 pages.
On long pages, list subheadings at the top and bookmark them.
On long pages, provide frequent links to the top.
Restrict every page to a single topic and purpose.
Redundant, outdated and trivial content
Remove all redundant, outdated or trivial content (ROT).
Do not duplicate information that is already on another page: link to it.
Include a date on every page that needs it, within the text.
Use dates instead of relative expressions of time such as ‘now’, ‘in the next six months’,
‘shortly’.
Where possible, refer to offices or roles, not individuals.
Don't use the future tense except in clearly dated news stories.
Give generic contact details, not personal names.
Links
Make link-text self-explanatory, so people know exactly what they will find when they
click.
Links must stand alone or be an item in a list. (Don't embed links in sentences.)
If a link is to a page on another web site, say so.
If a link opens a different type of file, state the type and size (e.g. PDF, 54 mb, 70
pages).
Lists
List items in the logical order for user.
Limit number of items on a list to 7 maximum.
Subdivide long lists into short lists of related items.
Provide descriptive headings.
Instructions and procedures
Separate procedures from other types of content, e.g. background information and
policy.
List steps in sequential order and number them.
Use simple sentence structure: "A does B" or "Do this".
Place links to necessary forms close to steps that require them.
Tables
Use tables only for data, not for text display.
Keep tables short enough to show on a screen without scrolling.
Keep tables narrow enough to fit easily on a screen.
Don't use tables if text wraps to next line.
Searchable content
Use keywords (words used by people searching for this page) in the content .
Use keywords in the headline. Example: not ‘When will this happen?’ but ‘Performance
appraisal July 2011.
Metadata that are the author's responsibility
Provide a unique search results title for every page.
Search results title: put specific keywords first, followed by general ones.
Search results title must tell people exactly which page they will find.
Summary metatag must describe or summarise the exact web page.
Images
Restrict image size.
Provide alt-text for all images.
Provide a long description for all complex images (e.g. charts and graphs).
Use of Word, Excel and PDF files
Publish all important information as HTML.
Don't use PDF, Excel or Word files without clear justification.
Bookmark all PDFs and make them searchable.
Multi-page documents
Subdivide long documents into pages (guideline for maximum length: equivalent of 5xA4
pages.)
Make every page self-sufficient: it must make sense in isolation.
Provide a printable version of the entire document and of each section.
Include the name of the entire document on every page.
Quality Web Content <words that wok>
Rachel McAlpine, June 2010
http://www.webpagecontent.com/arc_archive/177/5/
How to optimise your page and why this is important
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/its/servicessupport/web/search/faqs/improverank
There are lots of ways to improve the way your page is ranked and displayed in search
engines, provided you are willing to invest a little time. Most of these tips will apply
equally as well to the internal search tool as they do to external search engines, so you
can optimize your page for all search engines simultaneously. While you can't ever
control exactly how a search engine will rank and display your page in its results,
following these tips should help push your page higher up and make it more likely to
stand out from the crowd.
Many of these tips have been adapted from the Google SEO report card
and if you
require more information Google's own Search Engine Optimisation Starter Guide is well
worth a look.
Page title: formatting, length and content
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In most search engine results you will have exactly 60 characters to describe the
content of your website using the title caption. In Sitebuilder, the contents of the
title tag are set for you by filling in the page properties under 'Title bar caption'.
For more information, please see the Title Bar Caption FAQ.
You should make each character of your page's title count by including a
descriptive summary. For example: 'Google Talk - Chat online and make free
internet calls' would be a better page title than 'Home Page - its up to you'. You
should also use the page properties description field to describe your page.
Always include the name of your organisation, department or product in your
home page's title. If a user is searching for your website directly, when they
already know who you are, they are most likely to type this in.
When choosing what words to include in your title, consider what words users are
mostly like to search for. The search words a user types in will often get bolded in
their results and act as a positive reinforcement that your page is the right one
for their query.
Choose each word in your title carefully, words like 'it's', 'a', and 'of' are unlikely
to be typed in by users during search queries, and will be ignored by most search
engines anyway. They are often a waste of your title's precious 60 character limit.
Site description properties usage
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Often search engines will try to present better results to users by presenting a
'snippet' description of the web page beneath the title in search results. While you
can't control exactly what this snippet contains you can suggest a description for
your page using the 'description' field in your site builder page properties. For
more information, please see the Page Description FAQ.
Once you've entered some text in the description field, check how it appears in a
variety of popular search engines and make any necessary tweaks.
Google 'Sitelink' triggering
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Sitelinks are a series of internal links that occasionally appear beneath a home
page's title link in search page results. They can often make a website's result
look more professional and therefore reassuring to the end user, they also make
your page's result physically bigger on the results page. They look a bit like this:
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You can't choose when these sitelinks are shown, but you can optimize your site's
organisation to make their appearance more likely. Google advises:
o use a hierarchical structure
o use descriptive link text for links pointing to internal pages
o avoid deep nesting of content behind many subdirectories
Google allows you to block any unwanted sitelinks using their webmaster tools. If
your sitelinks contain unappealing or unwanted internal links then send an email
to the ITS Web Team at: webteam@warwick.ac.uk asking us to use Google's
webmaster tools to block the unwanted links.
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Page top heading
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Give the page an appropriate heading. This is the title that appears at the top of
the page (eg. the page heading of this page is "How do I improve the rank of my
page?"). If a term appears in the page heading it scores more highly in search
results than the same term appearing within the page content.
Page content and content headings
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Headings within the page content are often ranked more highly than normal,
italicised, bold or text styled in other ways. For this reason you may want to
format headings within your page content by choosing a heading style from the
Formatting drop-down menu on the toolbar
. Terms formatted as
'Heading 2' score higher than terms formatted as 'Heading 3' etc.
Search engines will tend to consider the words in headings in a similar way to the
words in your pages title, try to include words in your heading that you think
users would search for when looking for your page.
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A heading's affect on the page ranking will be limited to a certain short length of
heading by all search engines. There is no point making your entire page
'Heading 2' to try and boost its rank, for example.
Terms appearing in the main page content rank higher than those appearing in
the right-hand content. For this reason we recommend that you use the righthand column of your page for additional information such as links, news feeds or
images, ensuring that the most important information is presented in the main
page content.
Other factors
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Pages which have been edited more recently (within the last two years) often
rank higher than older pages, so if your page has not been edited for a long time
you may find that it slips down the search results. Check that the information is
still valid and perform a minor edit to improve its ranking.
Using descriptive text for internal links around your sitebuilder site can boost your
page's page ranking. Avoid link text like 'click here' and 'more'.
Do not embed important text such as names, contents or links in images or flash
applications as apart from being inaccessible to some users, search engines, such
as the Google crawler doesn't recognise text contained in images.
Ensure that all images, flash applications or slideshows have an alt (alternative)
tag description or some sort of descriptive text about the images used.
Technical information about how the document scoring works is available from the
Lucene documentation.