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The search engine on the UCLA Gateway site and the live portal site indexes both portal articles and websites on the UCLA domain. If you want to increase the ranking of your article in the search results, pay attention to the title, summary, keywords, and body fields, which are weighted by the search engine.
Title
It’s very important to write unique and descriptive titles for your articles because the title field carries more weight in the search engine than the other fields.
Summary (optional for lengthy articles)
If used, limit your summary to one or two sentences to explain what the reader will learn or do on the page. The summary often begins with an action verb. The summary appears at the top of the article and on the search results page.
Body
Place a variety of descriptive words–which a reader might typically search by–in the top portion of the article body. Words at the top of the page are given a higher rank by the search engine that those lower down.
Keywords
Repeat certain words that you think a reader might typically search by into this field, separated by a comma. Also, after completing the body of your article, you might ask yourself, “Are there any words or terms not included in my article that someone might actually enter into the portal search box to find it?” For example, if you wrote an article today regarding student housing, you would most likely refer to structure as a “residence hall.” However, it might occur to you that a parent searching the site for information on living arrangements for their child, might actually enter some older term they are more accustomed to like ‘dorm’ or ‘dormitory.’ In this case, you would then add these two terms into the Key Word attribute. If you do this, this parent will see the article about residence halls in their search results even though the old terms were never mentioned in your article.
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