Writing Guidelines for the Montclair State Web Site

Writing content for the web (as opposed to writing for print) requires a different mindset – and writing for the University Web site adds an extra set of concerns. The following rules and best practices are intended to help the reader to write not only good web content in general, but content in the mood and tone of the University Web site.

Audience

Before you sidle up to the keyboard you'll need to consider the message you want to convey, and the audience to whom you want to speak. For certain pages (like, for example, the University Homepage) the answer isn't so cut and dry. For other pages (like the Student Handbook) this will be immediately clear.

Audiences can be broken into two broad groups, insiders and outsiders. Insiders are people who are connected directly to the university – specifically students, faculty, staff, and administrators. Outsiders are people who aren't connected directly to the university – specifically prospective students, alumni, members of the local community, and the press.

When writing pages for insiders:

• Be clear and concise. State clearly the things you need to say and then say no more.
• Be factual. Don't add superfluous wording to attempt to color the reader's opinion. People who live and work here every day have their own opinions about the University. At best, the extra wording slows down readers seeking quick answers to specific questions. At worst, the extra wording frustrates readers whose opinions don't mesh with the tone.
• Use insider terms judiciously. Insiders are able to understand many of the acronyms and terms we use on-campus (i.e. CEHS, SBUS, OIT, Bursar, Registrar). However, there are limits to how much you can reasonably expect them to know (i.e. Group X, EOP, CAAAL). Consider your audience's subject knowledge when using campus-specific terms. When in doubt, spell out acronyms the first time they're used on the page. For example "To enroll in Group Exercise (Group X) sessions, please contact Campus Recreation."

When writing pages for outsiders:

• Stay on message. Each page should deal with one general theme. Each section of that page should deal with one topic. Each paragraph should convey one complete thought. Switching topics or themes can confuse and frustrate visitors.
• Avoid University-specific terminology. Outsiders can't be expected to know University-specific terminology or acronyms. Even alumni, the outsider group that knows the University the best, may have forgotten the terms or the terms may have changed since they graduated.
• Be (mostly) factual. Outsiders, and specifically Prospective Students, view online prose with a critical eye. Using overly-flowery language to color your prose can backfire if you lay it on too thickly. When you use text to color the reader's opinion, use only one term (i.e. "professional faculty," not "highly professional faculty"). When you can, opt for verifiable coloring text (i.e. "award-winning faculty" over "top-notch faculty"), but never imply something that isn't true (i.e. "ample parking").
• Consider your audience's literacy level. Alumni can be assumed to be able to read at a college level, but don't assume the same when writing for prospective students and community members. Community members come from a wide variety of backgrounds. Those who have not attended college won't know even general terms that apply to all Universities, and a significant portion may not speak English fluently. Prospective students begin their college search as early as 10th grade and some of them who are gifted in other areas may only read at a remedial level.
• Speak in a conversational tone. Refer to the University in the first person plural ("we" and "our") and the reader in second person ("you" and "your"). Use contractions. Consider the rhythm of your words as though they were being read aloud. However, try to keep your copy grammatically correct – high school students may not be experts on the subject but they can usually tell when something's out of place.

Message

As stated previously, each page should cover exactly one topic. For insiders, your topic is usually a factual topic – a category for classifying factual information (i.e. "Academic Honesty," or "Computer Lab Usage Etiquette"). For outsiders, your topic is usually a concept you want to convey (i.e. "We offer majors you want to study," or "Your annual gift helps real students").

Likewise, each page should only have one goal. Most of the time, the goal of a page is self-evident. A page titled "Academic Honesty" will probably have the goal of informing current students about the University's policy on plagiarism. Sometimes the goal may not be as self-evident. A page titled "About Our Academic Programs" may be intended to get a prospect to choose a program of interest and get detailed information about it.

Consider both the topic and the goal when writing your page copy. If you stray from the topic you'll frustrate your readers and, in turn, fail to reach your goal.

Most importantly, though, keep your readers' goals in mind when writing content. Give them the information they really want to know, not just the information you really want to tell them. Nobody's impressed with a FAQ page full of questions that have never been asked.

Use the following rules to create content that works for your readers:

• Choose clear, concise page titles. Don't be "cute" with page titles – instead choose the types of words your readers would use to describe the topic you're covering. While we may say "Academic Programs," Prospective Students more often search for "Majors and Minors." However, you should never trick a reader into viewing a page by giving it a page title that doesn't describe the content.
• Dedicate the first paragraph to summarizing the content of the page. Web site visitors often make snap judgments about whether or not they want to read a page, and "fluff" usually makes them not want to read a page. So, for example, for a department homepage the first paragraph should describe what the department is and what it does in the broadest possible strokes, not "welcome" readers to a "homepage."
• Use H2 and H3 tags to break your topic into sections and sub-sections. Sections and sub-sections break complicated topics into clear, easily understood chunks. This will help new visitors develop a mental model of the concept you're describing and help returning visitors find a specific piece of information they had read previously.
• Use UL and OL tags instead of comma delimited lists within the prose. Comma-delimited lists are more difficult to find and understand than bulleted and numbered lists when skimming a web page.
• Use STRONG (bold) and EMPHASIS (italic) tags appropriately. Save for speed readers, almost all readers process text through the part of the brain that handles speech. Because of this your page has a very real "voice" with tone and cadence. Bold text is perceived as anchored and strong, so text made bold is perceived to have an authoritative tone. Strong text should be used to state entire sentences or thoughts in an axiomatic tone, or to mark individual nouns as though they were proper nouns. Italic text is perceived as urgent or insistent. You can use it to flag concepts or nouns as important without implying that they are axiomatic. Please use bold and italic text sparingly. Reading text for long periods of time in an authoritative or insistent tone of voice can tire the reader which will case him or her to either navigate away from the page or to skip ahead.
• Use the ALT attribute to accurately describe the content of an image. Accurate ALT information is critical for providing accessibility vision-impaired visitors.
• Choose images that relate directly to your topic. ALT information is scanned by search engines. Rather than merely jamming the ALT attributes with key words, choose relevant images and describe them accurately.

Information Architecture

When building a site, as opposed to building individual pages, you must consider how the pages relate to each other and the navigational structure that creates.

Pages are arranged into a hierarchical tree structure with each page being a child of another page. This structure, in turn, is used to create the site menus and breadcrumbs.

Use this structure to group pages together in a way that will make sense to your visitors. Name pages in ways that make sense to the visitor, keeping in mind the terminology with which they're familiar.

Pages intended for outsiders should link to other pages intended for outsiders. Likewise, pages intended for insiders should link to other pages intended for insiders.

Page Optimization

In general, optimization simply means making something better – but when the term is applied to Web pages it usually implies that the page is being optimized for a specific purpose. The current buzz term is Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, which is the process of building a page so that it appears earlier in search results when a specific phrase is used.

Pages on the Montclair State Web site must first be optimized for clarity and then, if applicable, optimized for search engines. If SEO impedes the accuracy, clarity, or usability of a page you must always choose clarity over SEO. Choosing SEO over clarity may increase traffic to a page that makes a bad impression.

On the whole, pages intended for insiders should not use SEO techniques. Insiders will most likely use the site-specific search at the top of the University web template. However, it's important that page titles and summaries accurately describe the content of the page, and that we – as a whole – do not create a multitude of pages that cover the same topic. For example, don't use "About Us" as a page title, instead use "About the Biology Department" in order to improve search result relevancy.

Pages intended for outsiders can employ SEO techniques, but not every page must. The best strategy is to create pages on which you intend visitors to land and then to use SEO techniques to create an entry point. From there, try to guide the user experience to other outsider-focused pages in order to reach your goal.

SEO Techniques

• Use page titles that accurately and specifically describe the content while containing the search phrase for which you're optimizing. This is a difficult balance to strike, and it may not be possible in all cases. For example, the Graduate School might want to get better results for "Master's Degree New Jersey." That phraseology is awkward when put into a page title, so they may opt for the title "Master's Degree" and then include the term "New Jersey" in the text of the page (Keep in mind that "New Jersey" is in the footer of every page and is already tied to our domain through Google).
• Repeat the key phrase a few times in the page copy. It's important to repeat the key phrase several times in the page in order to create a strong association in the search engine with the page and the phrase. However, keep in mind that search engines are designed to detect when you're trying to game the system – so make sure that when you're repeating your key phrase you're doing it in a way that flows naturally with the rest of the text.
• Use H2 and H3 headings to create sections. Search engines will view pages with clear sections as having a higher "quality" than other pages, which leads to a higher page rank.
• Use HTML tags to describe the content accurately. Put paragraphs in P tags, Headings in H2-H6 tags, quotes in BLOCKQUOTE, lists in UL or OL, etc … Search engines don't look at pages visually, so in order to scan the pages and make sense of the content they must rely on the HTML tags and their intended meanings. When you use H2 or H3 because it "looks nice" instead of using it to delineate a section or subsection you hamper the search engine's ability to accurately index your page.
• Summarize the content of the page in the first paragraph. Search engines have been engineered to expect a summary of the page in the first paragraph. If you accurately describe the content of the page in the first paragraph (and use your key phrase instead of an inventive re-wording) you can improve search result relevancy.
• Use a similar summary in the meta "description" tag. Although search engines rely less on meta tags to index content than they do on the page content, the meta description is sometimes displayed by the search engine in place of an excerpt. Placing a clear concise summary of your page in this tag will help ensure that people using the search engine get a clear understanding of what's on your page.
  
• Link to pages using wording that describes those pages, including those pages' key phrases. Google takes the words other pages use to describe a page as a strong indicator as to the content of that page. Never use ambiguous phrases like "click here" or just the page URL to link to a page.
• Use images that include your key phrases and put that in the ALT attribute. Merely jamming your key phrase into the ALT attribute will be a hindrance to visually-impaired visitors. Your first priority with an ALT attribute is to accurately describe the content of the image. Therefore, image SEO actually starts in the image selection phase. Remember that images are content too, not merely decorations.
• Temper your expectations realistically. There are over 2,000 four-year colleges in the US and Google indexes them all. Even limiting search parameters to New Jersey, you have to expect to have difficulty surpassing Rutgers and Princeton – due to their name recognition – and TCNJ, RCNJ, NJIT,NJCU, and UMDNJ (since the search phrase "New Jersey" is a part of those institutions' names). The George Segal gallery will almost always have difficulty getting above the Thomas Segal Gallery for the search phrase "Segal Gallery." Anything within the first page of Google results should be considered a success, even if the page isn't on the top of the list.

Additional Reading

If you'd like to know more about writing web content in general, read the book "How to Write Great Copy for the Web" by Donna Spencer.

When authoring content for the Montclair State website you must follow the guidelines set forth by University Communications. Please make yourself familiar with the Editorial Style and Usage Guidelines and the Web Services Standards and Policies.