Optimizing for Search Engines (SEO) – Best Practices
On SEO – How Is My Site Indexed and Ranked by Search Engines? we explain how Scroll Viewport, by default, takes great care to deliver your help center in the most search engine optimized way possible.
On this page you will learn what you can do yourself, specifically when it comes to authoring your content, to increase your SEO rank.
Define Meta Descriptions for Articles
By default, Scroll Viewport uses the first 150 characters of your Confluence page to define meta description for your site’s pages. Meta descriptions are used by search engines to create short descriptions of your pages.
To improve how search engines rank and index your site's articles, we recommend optimizing meta descriptions with the help of the excerpt macro. Add the macro to all pages and set it to ‘hidden’ if you don’t want the content to be part of the article itself.
If you have placed more than one excerpt macro on your page, Scroll Viewport will always take the very first excerpt macro that appears on the page to define the meta description. The description limit is 165 characters.
Name Files and Add Image Alt-Texts
Make sure your images have meaningful file names and descriptive alt-texts that can give search engine clues about what’s shown on the image.
You can check and edit file names from the Confluence Attachments page.
Alt-text can be included when you insert the image in the Confluence editor
Alt-text will also enable users with visual limitations who use screen readers to know what is shown in the image.
Use Google Search Console to appear in Google search results
You can take a series of proactive steps to control a search engines' ability to find and parse your content.
To be included in the Google index, you can use Google Search Console to submit an indexing request for your Scroll Viewport site. Google has extensive help resources on this topic.
Learn How To Verify A Viewport Site With The Google Search Console.
Cross-Link Related Articles
Cross-linking related articles helps search engines crawl and surface related content. It also helps users stay on the site longer as they assume that if they’re looking for something, they probably also want to know more about something else (or eventually will get there). Therefore, linking to other articles is a good practice to follow in general, even beyond SEO consideration.
Use Keywords
Use keywords, synonyms and labels discreetly within the content without overdoing keywords. This will not only help surface the articles within search engines, but also within the help center’s own search and allow users to find the content they’re looking for.
It’s also good to keep titles short and frame it in a way that predicts the reader’s intent.
Example: Instead ‘Set up instructions’, opt for something like ‘How to set up…’