Introduction
Search engines are the most commonly used means to find information on the web. It is therefore important that European Commission websites perform well on search engines if they wish to reach citizens.
In this section, you will find information on how to achieve a good optimisation.
Europa Analytics and Google Search Console
The European Commission uses an open-source software called Matomo (previously known as Piwik) to measure the performance of its web presence; this software is customized within the Europa Analytics platform. This also provides insight on visitors coming from search engines, though it is not able to track the keywords the users searched for. For that purpose, Google Search Console is used.
Access to Web Analytics is granted to any ECAS user.
Other users can request access by writing to europamanagement@ec.europa.eu
Access to Google Search Console can be requested from europamanagement@ec.europa.eu. You will need to provide a working Google Mail address (e. g. ending with gmail.com), a short explanation of why the access is being requested and the authorization by the responsible head of unit or site owner.
Content SEO
This part of SEO is under the jurisdiction of content editors and content planners:
Technical SEO
When planning a new website, webmasters should ensure that the following features are active and properly implemented:
- W3C validated source code: well-formed and syntactically correct markup ensures that every device can correctly render a webpage
- XML sitemap: a list of all the pages accessible to the crawlers. Though not as meaningful as in the past, a sitemap is the first way to signal to the crawlers the creation or deletion of pages, or the restructuring of a website. They can be automatically generated by Drupal and other CMS
- Annotations with Schema.org: this markup allows crawlers to understand the semantic of a page and the relations between pages. It is easy to implement schema but extra work is required when planning which annotation to use in specific cases
- Responsive Design: ensuring the best graphical experience on every kind of device is an important ranking factor for search engines
- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP): this state of the art mobile HTML-subset allows pages to be loaded from Google cache instantaneously
- Language versions with hreflang: it is important to indicate all the language versions of a certain page
Off-site SEO
Off-site SEO, i. e. every optimisation that we can't directly influence with content or code, deals mostly with quality backlinks. Search engines use them as a way to determine the relevancy of a given page, with the assumption that if many websites link to a specific page for a specific keyword, that page must be relevant for it. In the same way social signals, such as retweets and shares, should be taken into consideration (e. g. by ensuring that our pages comply with Open Graph and Twitter Cards).
Contact and support
If you require further assistance, please contact:
European Commission
DG Communication
Unit B.3
Europa Web Communication