Geospatial Commission: Best practice guide for data publishers

The UK’s Geospatial Commission and its six partner bodies, British Geological Survey, Coal Authority, HM Land Registry, Ordnance Survey, UK Hydrographic Office and Valuation Office Agency, have published a new guide with practical advice on how to optimise access to geospatial datasets across all search engines. The main recommendations highlighted in the guide are:

• Complete all the metadata fields on your data portal.
• Restrict page titles and URLs to 50-60 characters; longer titles tend to be truncated and longer URLs tend to be give a lower ranking.
• Optimise your data abstracts; write clearly, write concisely.
• Use keywords appropriately in abstract and avoid keyword lists.
• Avoid the use of special characters that may not display correctly on a webpage.
• Page longevity improves search engine ranking; try to keep your URL the same even if your data changes..
• Remove out of date or pages that are no longer maintained; these are less likely to be shown in search results that more recently updated pages.
• Avoid metadata duplication; the same information available from multiple publishers or available in more than one place makes it likely the search results will have a lower ranking than one good metadata record.
• Consider using user surveys, interviews and some of the analytic tools available, such as Google Analytics and Search Console applications, to understand what geospatial information the target audiences are looking for and finding. If necessary adjust data portal abstracts and keywords to better reflect those search parameters.
• Apply all abstract and keyword changes to all pages on your portal to ensure a consistent search ranking.

It would interesting to know if the Geospatial Commission and partners will follow up with any agencies and organisations that implement these recommendations to see how much of an improvement is possible with respect to finding and accessing online geospatial datasets.