Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) guidance

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Search engine optimisation (SEO) helps direct the right users to the relevant content on your website. This creates a better user experience and a better source of online traffic.


Research before writing the content

To get the most out of SEO and content designing, it helps to understand the four distinct types of search intent. These include:

  1. Informational: When a user is searching for information on a topic, they will often include words such as 'how-to,' 'best,' 'tutorial,' and 'how.'
  2. Navigational: Sometimes, the user is looking for a specific web page or site. In this case, the words they use would be the actual name of the service, brand or product.
  3. Commercial: When someone is investigating a purchase, they will include search terms like 'review' or 'least expensive.'
  4. Transactional: Users will perform searches when they know they are ready to make a purchase. These users will enter terms like 'buy,' 'coupon,' or 'price.'

As a guide: Each article/news/information content page you write should have one primary keyword or keyword phrase with 5-10 additional keywords closely related to your primary keyword or the content’s focus.

Recommended Tools:

Adwords Keyword planner – available if you have an Google Adwords account.

Keywords everywhere – a Google chrome extension that will show you all the related keywords for a search you run in Google

  • After deciding the primary keyword, head to Google search and search with the primary keyword.
  • Examine the top 5 search results and try to visualise why these results are ranking on top.



On-page SEO techniques

On-page SEO is the practice of optimising web page content for search engines and users. Common on-page SEO techniques include optimising title tags, structuring content with heading styles, optimising content for featured snippets, internal links, URLs and improving readability.

Still, the most basic signal that the Google algorithm looks at in the page is that a webpage contains the exact keywords as your search query. If keywords appear on the page or appear in the page title (seo meta title), page’s headings or body, the content is more likely to be relevant.

  1. Make a compelling headline(title). Headline (title) provides the overview of what information the content/article is covering.
    • Use the primary keyword in the headline.
    • Write headlines that are clear, interesting and convey factual information.
    • Create a unique title for each page.
  2. Structure your content
    Breaking your content up into smaller paragraphs with headlines makes for an easy read that will keep your readers engaged. Think of the google page crawlers as skim readers of your content to understand context.
    • Subheadings should reflect the content in the body content and include highintent keywords (closely related to your primary keyword).
  3. Use keyword-rich phrases
    Use relevant, keyword-rich phrases in your title, page title, headlings (h2, h3) throughout your content to let your readers and the search engines know what your post is about.
    • Avoid overuse of your keywords aka keyword stuffing (negative impact)
    • Use keywords thoughtfully and sparingly, sticking to a more natural feel.
  4. Optimise and format your content for featured snippets (How to rank for featured snippets) Do your keyword research and aim for question-type search queries which are related to your primary keyword.
    • Question - Write the descriptive question using the keyword and use a H2 or H3 heading tag for the question.
    • Do not use accordions for your questions and answers. Google ignores answers if they are hidden in accordions.
    • Answer - Google wants a short paragraph – around 50 words – that directly answers the search query. Provide immediate, clear, keyword-rich and concise answers immediately after the question.
    • Alternatively you can provide an answer in a table or list format immediately after the question.
  5. Use anchor text when internal linking An internal link is any link from one page to another page on the same website. Descriptive anchor text is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink.
    • Avoid using ‘Read more’, ‘Click here', ‘Find out more', etc., short and vague terms to link other internal pages. Anchor text provides both search engines and users relevant contextual information about the link content.
  6. Improve readability Taking guidance from our content principles, you need to ensure that the content you create is:
    • simple and easy to understand
    • using plain English
    • focussed and to the point
    The more people that can understand the content, the better. Aim to keep readability at a level a 9 year old could comprehend.



Things to consider when publishing the content

  1. Title (H1) - It helps the search engine understand the page content
    • Use a unique title(h1) for each page on your site
    • The title should describe the topic of the page
    • Best practice is to keep it under 70 characters long
  2. Summary - giving readers a general idea about the content
    • Best practice is to keep it under 160 characters long
    • Don’t repeat the title
    • You want to give the visitor a reason to visit the page or read the content. WIIFM.
  3. Page (Meta) title
    • We encourage you to have the same title (h1) and the page title.
    • You want to give each page its own unique page title. Aim for 50-60 characters
      optimum length (including spaces)
    In some situations, you need to have a different title (h1) and different page title (SEO title) to provide more context to search engines and users.
    • Must be in sentence case and ending with [Page title here] | NSW Government
  4. Meta Description
  5. A good meta description can be one of the most important things users will see when searching.
    • It has to be enough to convince the user that your page will answer their question.
    • Each page on a site should have a unique, accurate, and specific meta description.
    • Remember to include the primary keyword in the meta description.
    • Keep it to 140-160 words and for the best result include a call to action if possible.
    • We encourage you to have the same Summary and the meta description
  6. URLs
    Ideal SEO optimise URL length should be 50 to 70 characters including www.nsw.gov.au/
  7. Image name, image alt tag and image size The Google search engine interprets an image from its name and its alt attribute (tag).
    • Always name the image keeping your keyword in mind and never use file names like 'IMG_722019'. That is wasted SEO.
  8. Robots tags
    To prevent content from appearing on search engines and internal search, please check the ‘noindex’ box under meta tag settings in Drupal.
    • If you eventually do want the content to show in search you will need to go back and remove that selection.
  9. Duplicate content
    Content that is the same on different pages or sites will affect your SEO rankings. Best practice recommendations include modifying your advanced Meta tags via Edit Content Meta tags accordion > Advanced:
    • Adding a Rel=canonical - A link to the preferred URL of the content on a page, it helps eliminate duplicate content penalties from search engines.
    • Adding Robots = noindex, nofollow - add this tag to the advanced options for any page that you do not want search engines to index at all.



Other important things to consider

Content hygiene Publishing your content on NSW Government is just one part of the journey. We need to continually monitor and optimise our content to ensure that we provide our users with the best possible experience. Part of that role is to undertake content hygiene (or maintenance)

  1. Broken links Broken links can not only negatively affect SEO results, but they will also cause frustration for our users if we send them to content that no longer exists or has moved
    • When notified or aware of a broken link, fix it fast.
  2. Thumbs up, Thumbs down (TUTD)
    Our TUTD tool is a means for us to get real-time user feedback on our content pages. When a user gives a thumbs down, they have the option of leaving additional anecdotal feedback, which you can use in your favour. Consider these aspects:
    • you can see in the comments any potential area of your pages that need to be improved
    • you may get content ideas if users seem to be focussing on a specific area that you don’t appear to be covering
    • you may be able to identify certain keywords that users are using that you don’t currently target.
  3. Off-page SEO techniques

    Link building and backlinks
    Link building is the most common way of optimising for off-page SEO ranking. Relevant links from other websites will improve the content authority of your site.

    Types of backlinks:

    • Link building strategies to get external websites to link to yours:
    • other relevant government sites with similar content
    • write or produce content for other relevant sites
    • public relations — can generate links, especially with the media
    • leverage partnerships and professional associations for co-linking

    Content authority
    The content authority score also helps to improve SEO. The most significant factor to influence this is backlinks. This means links coming in from other reputable organisations, agencies or departments give our content authority as relevant and useful.

    Follow versus no follow links
    By default, all links are ‘follow’ links unless the attribute known as 'nofollow' is added to a link or the page.

    301 Redirects
    If you are about to deactivate the page or need to change the URL of a page (which is shown in search engine results or linked from other websites), Google recommends using a server-side 301 redirect. This is the best way to ensure that users and search engines are directed to the correct page.

Visit our Content guidance section on nsw.gov.au to find out more. 

Need any more help?

If you have any questions, or require assistance with anything mentioned on this article, submit a request via the webform.

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