The Data Portal plugin includes numerous features to provide better SEO for your web site.
Permalinks
Using permalinks is an essential part of ensuring your pages are index properly. The Data Portal plugin uses the ResourceAgencyNum (ID) or UniqueIDPriorSystem as the permalink.
Depending on the name of your detail page your permalink will resemble:
https://yoursite.ca/detail-page/resourceagencynum
A new feature to add the service name to the permalink is also available, if enabled your permalink will resemble:
https://yoursite.ca/detail-page/resourceagencynum/service-name
The service name is a simple vanity technique and actually doesn’t make a difference but helps place keywords in the URL for better placement in search engines.
Agency and site permalinks are similar:
https://yoursite.ca/detail-page/resourceagencynum/agency
https://yoursite.ca/detail-page/resourceagencynum/site
Please Note: If you make any changes to the permalink settings you have to go to the WordPress Permalink page and click on save. This will ensure any changes are saved and will come into effect immediately.
Page Titles, Meta Tags and OG Tags
The Data Portal plugin will automatically insert these tags to all of your search result and detail pages. The only SEO Plugin that Data Portal Currently supports is called Simple SEO. It is not recommended to use a different 3rd party SEO plugin as they will probably overwrite all of the generated page titles and tags with their own information.
Site Maps
You can generate an XML site map through the Data Portal plugin. This is a manual process and recommended to be done every month or two. From the main Data Portal Admin page, click on “Generate / Refresh” at the bottom. The link to your site map is also provided that you can use to submit to Google Search Console and other search engines. It is not necessary to use any other 3rd party site map tools as they will not provide links to your topic, detail and agency pages missing out on thousands of links. A local cache of records may be required if your site only services a portion of your data set (ie a portion of a provincial data set). If you site uses the entire data set the site map will be generated for all records available.
Analytics
Google Analytics is the industry standard for collecting web site statistics. We recommend using the WordPress plugin called Google Site Kit (developed by Google). Initially some of our themes provided a spot to enter your Google Analytics ID, this is now deprecated with GA4 and using Google Site Kit is recommended to get additional features and better integration.