Maximizing Your Hits

By Sharon Marek, Central Web Support

UNT uses Netscape's Compass Server as our search engine, and we index 42 UNT Web servers. These servers host official information - from the Colleges and Schools, Academic and Administrative Web sites. We don't index the personal pages at people.unt.edu .

This search engine is case sensitive - so a search for "university of north texas" will get different results than a search for "University of North Texas." Consider providing key information on your Web pages in upper and lower case. UNT's search engine indexes the first 8192 bytes of each page it encounters. And while that is a lot of space, try to ensure that your most important information is included in that top 8192.

Meta* tags are indexed - so feel free to include keyword or description tags with searchable terms. But your best bet is still the title tag. This title doesn't appear on the Web page itself, but does appear at the top of the browser window. Here's an example title tag.

<title>University of North Texas: Web Site Search</title>

The Title is the Thing

The title of a Web page is the only part that's guaranteed to be indexed by every search engine -- and it's particularly important here. The title of your Web page actually represents your Web page in UNT's search engine. The contents of the title tag make up the hyperlink in the search results. And descriptive titles provide more information for the searchers. Pages without titles are represented by their URL. 

If you have any questions about UNT's search engine, or you believe that your Web server is not being indexed, please contact me at marek@unt.edu.

*A good explanation of Meta tags and examples of their use can be found at Search Engine Watch.