Making sure your course appears in the course search
The course search takes into account certain things on the course page AND meta data:
- The course title (which is also the h1)
- The keywords in the meta data field
- The description field
- UCAS code field and
- the ‘Search strapline’ field
If your course has popular terms (or synonyms) that people are likely to search for that are not included in the content of the list above, you need to add them to the keyword metadata.
Remember: The course finder is a filter not a search and therefore will not return synonyms.
This is what the course finder ‘sees’ (this links to the data file used by course finder)
Top tip! Not sure what synonyms and related words to add as keywords? Ask chatGPT, Bing Chat or google bard to generate a list 🙂
Once added to the keyword field, they will make the course start showing for those terms in the course search results.
Redirects
Here is an example of a course page redirect: https://www.brighton.ac.uk/courses/study/linguistics-with-policy-and-planning-bahons.aspx
Redirects are a blank page in the /courses/study folder that just have the pathway name, award, campus and mode of study (ft/pt/placement). They act like a normal page in that they’ll appear in the course search results but anyone clicking on them will land on the parent course page. Having redirects avoids duplication of content which is not great for SEO or content management.
Note these are not the same as aliases! Similar but not the same.
Make it a redirect by adding the full url of the parent course page in the metadata RedirectURL field.