Communications Standards Updates: Search Engine Optimization

Notifications about changes made to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy's (EERE's) communications standards will be posted regularly, highlighting the latest updates to the EERE Communications Standards and Guidelines website and important pages to note.

Today, we’re looking at requirements and best practices to optimize your content for search engines. Search engine optimization (SEO) is an important part of the content creation and maintenance process for DOE websites. More than 60% of EERE web traffic comes from search engine referrals, and SEO helps people find web content through search engines. 

Best Practices for Website Content

Follow these best practices for improving your content’s search optimization:

• Ensure your content is useful. Answer common questions about the topic, include keyword variations, and include definitions where it makes sense.
• Write content that is clear, concise, unique, and authoritative to increase page rankings on commercial search engines. Follow the requirements of the Plain Writing Act of 2010.
• Give each page a unique title that makes it clear to users coming from search engines what the page is about and how the page is distinct from others throughout the site (e.g., use a full title like "Bioenergy Technologies Office Contacts" instead of just "Contacts"). Avoid using vague names, jargon, or marketing slogans, but include at least one main keyword related to your page's content.
• Keep summaries concise and clear about what the webpage’s content contains. Use strong and descriptive keywords, as search engines may pull this data into search results.
• Properly structure headings. Your page title will be the Heading 1 (H1) for the page; do not add other H1s in the content. Use Heading 2, Heading 3, etc. to organize content into sections and subsections, adding them according to hierarchy (i.e., H2s first, then H3s, etc.). Do not use heading styles based solely on appearance.
• Analyze search data, using programs like Google Search Console, SiteImprove, and Google Analytics 4, to find common search terms. Rewrite content (particularly headings) as needed, based on these data, to include words that customers typically search for.
• Ensure all graphics and images used on a webpage have alt text, both for SEO and Section 508 compliance.
• Conduct regular web content maintenance, eliminating redundant, outdated, and trivial content. Replace or remove this content, as well as any broken links.

Our website has more information on best practices when using keywords and properly linking content to improve SEO for your content. You can also view information on SEO best practices for PDFs, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents

Questions?

For questions related to SEO, please email the EERE Digital Team.

If you have any questions or suggestions related to communications standards, please email the EERE Comms Standards Team.