COVID-19 Metadata, SEO and social media

Back to COVID content guidance

When applied correctly, metadata helps relevant pages rank higher in search results. It can help Canadians access and share the critical information they are looking for.

• Search engines use certain metadata fields such as metatitle, description and keyword as ranking factors, for results display, and to create rich snippets; the Canada.ca search engine boosts the metatitle, description, and keyword fields; additionally URL is a relevancy and minor ranking factor.
• Social media sites (tweets, posts) are pulling: title, description
• In the context that we are in, focusing on these ones will give you the most benefits:
  • Title must be unique, accurately summarize, and distinguish the page content. It should be short and start with the most important keywords (in case it is truncated in search results.)
  • Description should provide concrete additional information about what the users will find on the page, or what task they can complete.
  • Keywords should include relevant words from the page as well as their commonly known synonyms
  • URLs should use plain language keywords from the title and be separated with hyphens