Better SEO for by-elections

[chris48s]

We would like to have better SEO for by-election searches by name. For example, we would ideally like people searching Google for "Gospel Oak by election" or "Camden Gospel Oak by election" to see https://whocanivotefor.co.uk/elections/local.camden.2017-11-09/post-LBW:E05000134/gospel-oak as a highly ranked result.

There are a few things we can probably do to help this:

1. Improve meta-data for this page/view - get relevant search terms like the ward name and "by election"/"by-election" into the meta description.
2. Improve discoverability of pages for current by elections by adding a "this week's by-elections" or an "election feed" to the front-page of the site. This will also help the site to show what we do when we're outside a major election cycle.

This probably requires us to differentiate a bit between by-elections and scheduled elections in the data model. For example, I wouldn't want the "this week's elections" panel on the home page to be listing hundreds of posts when there is a major scheduled local election coming up.

[andylolz]

sitemap.xml currently includes https://whocanivotefor.co.uk/elections/local.camden.2017-11-09/camden-local-election but not the URL mentioned.

[chris48s]

Interesting.. we probably don't want to go down to the post/ward level for scheduled elections otherwise the sitemap will be enormous, but for by-elections I think the ward/post name is much more important as an identifier/search term.

[andylolz]

otherwise the sitemap will be enormous

I think it’s fine to split the sitemap into multiple files…

[chris48s]

so you can: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/75712?hl=en :+1:

[chris48s]

election feed added in #237 - metadata/sitemap work still to do

[symroe]

Site map still not done, but we now title by-elections properly, so that might help

[michaeljcollinsuk]

@symroe doesnt look like the sitemap has been touched since this ticket was created so it think this should remain open