Five tips to improve the findability of your SharePoint Content

Improving the findability of your web content by search engines like Google and Bing is big business.  Many practitioners can help with your Search Engine Optimisation or SEO for your public facing website.

As an employee in a company with SharePoint, you too can maximise the findability of the Word Documents, PowerPoint files and Excel Spreadsheets that you upload to your intranet.  Having your documents appear higher on your Intranet's search results then your co-workers has to be a good thing, if only for bragging rights!

Five tips to improve the findability of your documents in SharePoint Search Results.  

1. Make the title of your document as descriptive and catchy as possible.  The title is typically weighted highest when a user scans their search results page.  The more someone clicks on your document, the higher the search engine will rank your document the next time someone searches on those keywords.
2. Target a human audience with your title, but add as many (natural) keywords as you can for the search engine.
3. Include Header Styles (H1, H2, H3, H4 etc) in the content of your word documents.  Keywords located in headers are ranked higher than keywords in Paragraphs, so include keyword rich content in each of your headings.
4. For Excel files add a tab called Description and write a human readable description for your spreadsheet.  Not many people include key words in excel files, so a descriptive paragraph will provide your search engine with keyword gold!
5. Fill in all of your Metadata categories every time you upload a document.  Make sure you complete every metadata field on the Edit Properties page, whether it is compulsory or not!  If you fill in this field and your co-worker doesn't then there is a good chance you will rank higher on the search results page.