Search Engine Optimization
How to include Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in your Boston.gov content.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Why does SEO matter?
SEO is how we get Boston.gov pages higher up in the search results for search engines, like Google. Strong SEO makes sure residents can easily find and access your content.
How and where do I use SEO ?
SEO means thinking about the ways that residents naturally search for information rather than relying on City specific jargon and acronyms. It requires using plain language and terms that a non-City employee might use to describe and find essential resources. SEO should be baked in to all areas of your content. The following are a few key ways to make sure you're using SEO in your content.
Title and Initiative Name
When creating a title or naming a project or initiative, you want to use language that aligns with how people describe, think about, and search for that subject. While it may be tempting to get creative with naming conventions, creativity can often lead to less visibility when it comes to search results, and ultimately means that residents won't get the information they need about the work you're doing. EXAMPLE If someone is looking for summer job opportunities for their child, the page they'll want to go to is futureBos on Boston.gov. The most likely search terms that someone would put into a search engine would be something like "Youth summer jobs in Boston". Lets take a look at the google results for that search.
The futureBos landing page doesn't appear as a link on the first page, or the first 15 pages, of the Google search results. It does appear as a pill link under the Youth Employment and Opportunity page, but a user would have to know ahead of time that clicking on that pill link would take them to youth jobs information.
Ultimately, residents using Google won't be able to easily find vital information about how to find and apply for youth summer jobs in the City. We noted this issue with the Youth Jobs team and made the adjustment to make the title of the page more user friendly.
After just 24 hours, the page started appearing at the top of search results:
Intro Text
This 1-2 short sentence section of the page is what search engines use to populate the description of your search result. When writing your intro text use related search terms to help keep your page at the top of those results. A good way to think of related search terms is to think about how you would describe and explain your content to someone new and unfamiliar to the City. EXAMPLE: To go back to the Youth Summer Jobs example. You’ll want to use the words “youth” “summer” and “jobs” as naturally as you can within the text, also consider using related words that Google will pick up on as contextualizing. For example, “work” and “hiring” would be great options to include in the intro text for a summer jobs post.
Website Body In the rest of your webpage you’ll want to continue using plain language in searchable terms that people are likely looking for. There are some other helpful SEO tips to consider when writing your content. Bulleted lists / numbered lists: Google tends to prioritize content that it sees as actionable steps or listed information. When there are actionable steps, consider adding those steps as a simple numbered list. This will help Google know that this is actionable information, in addition to quickly outlining important information for residents. If you find yourself writing long sentences using commas to list out a bunch of things, consider switching to a bulleted list. It's better for SEO, accessibility, and visual scanning of a page. Hyperlinks: Adding relevant hyperlinks into the text serves three purposes:
It helps direct residents to relevant information related to the page.
It lets search engines know that the page is connected and relevant to other indexed pages, which improves a page's positioning in search results.
Folks in the disability community who may have low vision or are blind use screen readers to engage with websites. Contextual linking allows then to better understand where they are going, instead of seeing a bunch of "Click here" links.
We can't emphasize this last point enough. When adding hyperlinks into text remember to keep the hyperlinks contextualized. Instead of "Click here to learn more about Youth Summer Jobs", a contextualized link would look like "Learn more about Youth Summer Jobs".
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