Basics and Terminology

Frontmatter is a term used to describe a grouping of important, contextual information. It was originally coined in publishing and denotes the first few pages of a book that contain printing and copyright information.

By using the Web Content Template for content documents, we have already included space for those fields:

• Slug
• Parent
• SEO Title
• Meta Description

SEO is an important part of how your pages appear in search results. These fields populate the google snippet, and communicate to search engines and social media what your page is about.

SEO Title: The clickable headline that appears on search engine results pages and browser tabs. 60 character max.

• Formatting the SEO Title: Page Title – Unit – University of Michigan
  • U-M is also acceptable if it exceeds ideal character counts
• Example: Home – Dean of Students – University of Michigan

Meta Description: a short HTML tag that summarizes a webpage’s content for search engine results pages. 160 character max.

OG Image (optional): An Open Graph image is the custom visual preview that appears when a webpage link is shared on social media platforms, messaging apps, or text previews. Best practice dimensions are 1200×630 pixels.

Hide from search engines: Use this for pages you do not want indexed by search engines i.e., internal only pages.

These fields organize your pages within your site hierarchy.

Slug: the specific, human-readable part at the end of a web address that identifies a distinct page.

• Example: https://deanofstudents.umich.edu/student-programs/expect-respect

Parent page: a top-level hierarchical page in content management and web systems.

• Example: https://deanofstudents.umich.edu/student-programs/expect-respect
• In the example above, “student programs” is the parent page