Hello, here are some best practices to improve the referencing and SEO of your portal.
What is SEO?
As a reminder, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a set of techniques used to make a site appear in the results pages of search engines. It gathers technical aspects of web accessibility and takes user needs into account from the point of view of content: who is it for? What answers can the site provide? Moreover, it considers the current situation, if your subject is in the trends, you will have an easier time being positioned correctly on Google.
!WARNING! Google favors what it perceives as beneficial for users, and penalizes heavily when it thinks that one is trying to artificially optimize the SEO.
The branding
Having an explicit domain name means that it should be related to the keywords you consider important. It must be in accordance with your organization and your main services.
The title and description of the portal configured in the Appearance - Branding section is also a very important SEO criterion to take into account.
Make sure that the titles of the datasets themselves should also be clear, meaningful, and concise.
Example 1: a user searches for "opendata paris" and ideally arrives on opendata.paris.fr.
Example 2: the Occitania regional government has created a branding around the term "The Region". Today, when we do a search using this keyword, we will mainly find articles on their subject. It is important to build a real brand image around its main keyword.
Linking with your organizational site
Adding a link to the portal from the organizational site and all the sites/blogs of its organization and its partners increases the traffic and thus the natural referencing of the portal.
Example 1: Enedis published an article on its corporate website linking to the open data portal, thus generating more traffic.
In addition, don't hesitate to set up a publication calendar on social networks that includes at least one publication per quarter of a dataset on Twitter and/or LInkedin related to the news.
If you have a business blog, you can also set up a datastory approach in order to gain visibility towards new audiences and thus encourage visits to the open data portal.
Geographic location
Generally, your pages will be positioned on Google according to your geographical location and not the language of the pages. If you are in France but your search browser is set in English, you will not get the same results as someone in the United States or in another English-speaking country.
If you want to see your page better positioned abroad as well, you must :
Favour the .com
Give priority to English
Research and prioritize your keywords in your sites
List the keywords
Keywords are a key element of the SEO strategy. The keyword strategy is a big project but when it comes to a single page, you have to pay attention to :
The difficulty of the keyword (or Keyword Difficulty, score given by Google)
The search volume (to be well positioned compared to other existing keywords)
The configuration of your pages
Meta description
(This is the part that appears below the website name on a Google Search. Located in the <HEAD> part of a page's source code, meta tags are used to provide metadata to the browser, i.e. information about the page in question. If they are of limited importance today in terms of SEO, they are on the other hand crucial for your target to quickly understand the interest of your page.
The hierarchy
Google will read your page as you read it: your eye will be attracted by the titles, the general presentation of the page but especially its structure. If the robots see that there is no logic in the hierarchy, it will penalize your page.
Text appearing on images
Text on images is not readable by a search engine. To highlight it, it must be highlighted by tags.
ALT image tags
This tag can be an asset to generate traffic in another way. 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 via image search.