July 2020 Newsletter
An Invitation
Be Part of our Upcoming Usability Testing
In the following weeks, we will be conducting a couple of usability exercises as part of our efforts to improve our search results page and our website. This testing will be simple, brief and remote. If you would be interested in participating, please let us know by emailing us to search@gsa.gov. We will email further details and instructions once we finalize the list of participants. We’re hoping for a big pool of participants so we don’t need to ask too much of any one of you.
SEO Pro Tip
Page Level SEO Best Practices
If properly implemented, page level SEO components can have a big impact on how your pages rank and display. Search engine rankings are significantly affected by:
Content of the page: Make sure each page has unique, plain language content, and that the text is machine readable. Search engines will be able to read your page text cleanly, and so will screen reader tools, so your site will be more accessible too. This means avoid inserting text blocks via client-side javascript.
Title tag: Titles tell searchers what the page is about and that it’s relevant to their query. In search results, search engines will highlight your keyword phrases if a user has searched for those terms, which increases visibility and click-through rate. Best practices for title tags include:
- Put the most important keywords at the beginning of the title
- Give each page a unique title, and make sure that title gets put in the tag
- Keep titles at 55 characters or less in length, including spaces
Meta descriptions: Sometimes used in results display, meta descriptions are always part of the query matching process. They require a smart use of keywords, written into a good, plain language description, to help users choose the content that will best address their needs.
URL: We recommend to:
- Describe the content of the page
- Include keywords Use hyphens, not spaces or underscores Keep them short and simple
- Favor static URLs
- Try to limit the number of folders in your URL structure
Check out these page level SEO resources we have posted on our website:
- Metadata and tags you should include in your website
- Get search engines to index the right content for better discoverability
Product Updates
Roadmap for FY20 Q4
We’ve posted our roadmap for July-September 2020. Built based on your feedback, it reflects what’s most important to you, and prioritized accordingly.
Indexing Frequency
If we index your website is using an XML sitemap, great news: we’ll be checking for updates more frequently (up to four times a day)!
Release Notes
Want to learn about the latest features, fixes, and focuses of the Search team? We post monthly Release Notes on our website.