Search Engine Optimization

News and Events on Search Engine Optimization

24 posts

Planning and implementing a search engine for a redesigned federal government website

In this blog, we walk you through our planning and implementation process for Search.gov. We share lessons learned, as well as resources we found useful. — via DOI Revenue Data

May 26, 2023

SEO

Tapping Into SEO: How Government Websites Can Improve Content Reach

Implementing a few easy steps for research and search engine optimization can help boost your content and get it in front of the right audience.

Posts by Albinko Hasic

May 20, 2020

Findability

Experimenting with SpecialAnnouncement Markup (Updated June 09, 2020)

What USA.gov learned during its pilot with SpecialAnnouncement markup to make COVID-19 information easier to find in search results, now updated to reflect changes by major search engines.

Posts by David Kaufmann

May 11, 2020

Connecting Americans to Coronavirus Information Online

The American people need access to the most up-to-date public health guidance and information on coronavirus testing facilities. To help Americans find coronavirus information online, incorporate Schema.org’s new standard tags into all web pages related to COVID-19. — via The White House

Apr 24, 2020

How Search Engines Index Your Websites

Join Search.gov as they walk you through the fundamentals of how search engines monitor your content and pull relevant data from your pages.

Watch Video

Posts by Dawn Pointer McCleskey

May 29, 2018 2018

A Conversation With ITIF About the State of Federal Government Websites

Since it’s been nearly six months since their report was released, we wanted to check in with ITIF and see what they’ve learned, what they’ve heard from agencies and what their future plans are to build on this research.

Posts by Andrea Sigritz

Sep 20, 2017

Steps Towards SEO: Meta Descriptions on MedlinePlus

MedlinePlus is a consumer health website produced by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), available in both English and Spanish. As part of our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy, we recently added meta descriptions to our health topic pages. A meta description is a short HTML attribute in the head tag that describes the contents of a

Posts by Kate Masterton Posts by Katie Chan

Apr 14, 2017

New ITIF Report Inspires a Closer Look at Website Performance and Security—Here Is Where to Begin

The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) recently published a report, Benchmarking U.S. Government Websites, that looks at the performance, security, and accessibility of the top 297 government websites. ITIF is a think tank in Washington, D.C. whose mission is to formulate, evaluate, and promote policy solutions that accelerate innovation in technology and public policy.

Posts by Digital.gov Team

Mar 24, 2017

Automatic HTTPS Enforcement for New Executive Branch .Gov Domains

HTTPS is a necessary baseline for security on the modern web. Non-secure HTTP connections lack integrity protection, and can be used to attack citizens, foreign nationals, and government staff. HTTPS provides increased confidentiality, authenticity, and integrity that mitigate these attacks. In June 2015, the White House required all new federal web services to support and

Posts by Eric Mill Posts by Marina Fox

Jan 19, 2017

Help Search Engines Help You: How SEO-Friendly URL Structure Can Boost Your Rankings

Have you ever wished you could get inside the mind of Google? To figure out what makes its search engine tick? How great it would be if that were easy to do. Well, actually it is. I realized that recently when I was doing research for one of my personal passions, which is finding invasive

Posts by Cliff Tyllick

Jun 03, 2016

The Content Corner: How Google Judges Your Content

Every week my main goal is to usually provide new ways to help you feed the content beast. However, today I am going to remind you of why feeding the beast is important, especially when it comes to your search engine rankings and helping users find your content. I’ve discussed key search engine optimization (SEO)

Posts by Tyrus Manuel

Mar 07, 2016

The Content Corner: The Balance Between SEO and the User

I always think of SEO like the dentist—no one really likes it, but you need to do it. Yet, despite my lack of excitement for the topic, this will be at a minimum my second post (here’s the first) about the relationship between creating good content and SEO practices. Today I want to dive a little

Posts by Tyrus Manuel

Nov 30, 2015

HTTPS and Other Ranking Factors: What Impacts the SEO of Government Websites?

Following the recent OMB memo that all publicly available federal websites and Web services must implement HTTPS by December 31, 2016, Web content managers across government are considering the SEO (search engine optimization) implications of the transition, among other details.

Posts by Dawn Pointer McCleskey

Sep 02, 2015

The Content Corner: Optimize Your Content

For the past several weeks, I have been writing about fairly cerebral and more technical aspects of content generation and language in general. This week, I felt it was time to get back to a more basic content concept: content optimization. Frequently when content optimization is discussed it is heavily focused on search engine optimization

Posts by Tyrus Manuel

Aug 31, 2015

Trends on Tuesday: The Impact of ‘Mobilegeddon’ on Non Mobile-Friendly Sites

Adobe released its quarterly Adobe Digital Index report this month, which showed websites that aren’t mobile optimized are seeing more than double-digit drops in traffic from Google’s organic search referrals. This is after the leading search engine announced it would start penalizing websites, after April 21st, that weren’t optimized for mobile—also called “Mobilegeddon.” Microsoft’s Bing search engine also

Posts by Will Sullivan

Aug 11, 2015

Our Customer is Your Customer: Working Together to Improve Search on .Gov Websites

We know search engines aren’t Magic 8 Balls, but that’s still how we expect them to behave. We want them to answer our complex and burning questions based on just a few words. And we’ve felt that frustration when the top search results don’t serve our needs, and the results page itself makes us work.

Posts by Dawn Pointer McCleskey

May 14, 2015

Mobilegeddon: Government Edition

Much is being said and written about the coming Mobilegeddon/Mopocalypse on April 21st—the day Google’s ranking algorithm will begin boosting results for mobile-friendly sites and penalizing mobile-unfriendly sites. While some agency websites are mobile-friendly, a great many are not. We will do well to pay attention—almost 25% of traffic on government websites is coming from

Posts by Dawn Pointer McCleskey

Apr 15, 2015

Avoid Weak ‘Links’ in Your Digital Chain

Users don’t like surprises. Unexpected or unwanted content undermines the credibility of your agency and frustrates users who come to your website looking for specific information. Using links appropriately in your website content is one way to build trust with users, according to an article by Kara Pernice of the Nielsen Norman Group. Here’s a

Posts by Ashley Wichman

Feb 25, 2015

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