Best practices for search engine optimization (SEO)

This resource aims to provide you with tips and tricks to improve the referencing of your data portal. 

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a set of techniques aimed at improving a website's ranking in search engine results. It includes technical aspects like web accessibility and focuses on understanding user needs: Who is the content for? What questions does it answer? Additionally, if a topic is trending, your page is more likely to rank higher on Google.

Google favors what it perceives to be beneficial for users (see Google's tips), and penalizes content it perceives to be artificially manipulating its SEO. For a more complete discussion of bad practices, see Google's policies on spam.

Your domain name should be explicit and related to keywords you consider important. It should meaningfully align with your organization and the main services you propose.

Your workspace's title and description are also important for SEO, and are configured in the Portal > Branding section. 

Finally, it's helpful to ensure that the titles of your datasets are themselves clear, meaningful, and concise.

Example 1: A user who searches for "opendata paris" should ideally be shown opendata.paris.fr.

Example 2: The Occitanie regional government has developed branding around the term "The Region." Today, when search using this otherwise generic keyword, we will find articles about the Occitanie region. It's important to build a real brand image around your main keywords.

Adding a link to the portal from an organization's website, as well as its affiliated websites, blogs, or parter websites, increases traffic to the portal, and thus organically improves the portal's indexation. 

Example: You publish an article on your corporate website that links to your open data portal, driving some portion of your website's users to your open data portal. 

If possible, set up a publication calendar on social networks such as Twitter or LinkedIn. At least once a quarter, publish a post about one of your datasets that relates to the news in some way. 

If you have a business blog, you can also use a data story approach to help gain visibility among new audiences, and thus encourage yet more visits to your open data portal. 

Generally, your pages will be ranked on Google according to your geographic location and not their language. If you are in France but your browser is configured to use English, you will not get the same results as someone in the United States or another English-speaking country. 

If you want to see your page better positioned abroad as well, you must:

• Favor .com addresses

• Give priority to the English language

• Research and select the appropriate keywords to use on your pages

Keywords are a crucial element of any successful SEO strategy. Creating a full-fledged keyword strategy can be a big project but, at least as regards a single page, you should pay attention to:

• The so-called difficulty of the keyword (or Keyword Difficulty, a score given by Google)

• The search volume (to be well-positioned compared to other existing keywords)

The hierarchy

Google scans pages much like you read them. In other words, your eye is attracted to the titles, the general presentation of the page, and especially its structure. Similarly, if the bots struggle to understand the hierarchy of the information on your pages, it will penalize your page. 

Text in images—the alt attribute

Text that is part of an image is not readable by a search engine. For it to be detectable, it must be indicated using the "alt" attribute of the image tag. For example, if someone searches for "map of bike lanes in the city of New York" and you have an image on your page that is properly tagged as “bike lanes, new york”, you have a chance that someone will come across it through an image search.