Inspiration

How Can SEO Help With Inmate Searches Online?

by codegrape / January 18, 2023

About 1,215,800 individuals were held in federal and state prisons in the United States in 2020. The Bureau of Jail Statistics (BJS) under the U.S. Department of Justice reported that this figure represented a 15% decline from 1,430,200 in 2019.

Some families need an efficient way to search for their incarcerated loved ones. To address this need, various websites dedicated to inmate search have popped up to assist these families in looking for their friends and relatives in prison quickly and conveniently.

One such service is Lookupinmate, which is an online inmate records checker with access to about 7,000 correctional facilities across the U.S.

To help these online lookup services become more visible and accessible to individuals that need them, the service operators of such websites should consider search engine optimization (SEO) for assistance.

Why is SEO important to online inmate search websites? What are the ways SEO can improve a website’s ranking? Are keywords the only important thing for SEO?

This article explains why online inmate searches need to incorporate SEO into their websites and how website operators can implement SEO through keywords, informative content, links, and metadata.

Importance of SEO to Online Inmate Search Websites

SEO can help boost a website’s ranking on the search engine results page. Due to the search engines’ complicated algorithms, online users typically perceive sites that are on top of these pages to be trustworthy and high-quality.

SEO is an unpaid marketing strategy in contrast to paid methods like pay-per-click (PPC). Thus, the success of a website’s SEO campaign depends on organic access and does not rely on paid clicks.

Furthermore, SEO helps a website reach more online users.

For inmate search website operators, SEO is a tool to help these sites become more visible to individuals who need an online service to find incarcerated loved ones.

The Ways SEO Can Help a Website’s Rankings

The following SEO elements, when implemented successfully, can help improve a website’s search engine result rankings:

Keywords

Keywords are words or phrases you typically input in the search engine’s search box. The reader might be looking for a specific page with relevant information using search terms like the following:

How to locate a prisoner in the U.S.
How do you find a Washington inmate?
List of jails in California
Current inmates listed in Clarke County jail
What is an ADX?

By identifying and targeting these keywords and incorporating them into the website’s content pages, there is a chance that a particular page will rank high in the search results for that specific keyword.

After specifying and choosing a keyword phrase for a given page, inmate search website operators should consider whether to use the entire keyword phrase or part of it in the following sections:

The page’s uniform resource locator (URL) address
The page title
Page headings and subheadings

Relevant Content

Aside from the page’s URL, title, headings, and subheadings, content is among the essential factors influencing the page’s search engine rankings.

One way website operators can improve rankings through content is to repeat relevant keyword phrases several times throughout the page.

For example, a web page containing the keywords “California jails” should consider mentioning these words once or twice in the introductory paragraphs and about two to four times throughout the article.

Strategically linking content to additional information and relevant sources within the website and to external sites is also helpful in improving SEO ranking. Using heading tags, such as H1s and H2s, and formatting elements, like bold and italics, can help emphasize keyword phrases and improve visibility.

More importantly, inmate search website operators should not throw keywords into content haphazardly. SEO should not be a reason to sacrifice good writing, and language and writing style must flow naturally.

Operators should remember that high-quality pages are written for the reader, not the search engine.

Metadata

Metadata is the information regarding the contents of a web page. Web designers typically place this information in the space between the <head> tags.

As a website changes or gets updated over time, website operators should review the metadata to ensure the information is consistent with the page’s content.

The following metadata types play a role in SEO:

Title metadata: This metadata provides the page titles that appear at the top of a browser window. Title metadata also functions as the headline that typically shows up in the search engine results.
Description metadata: The description metadata contains the page’s textual description that a browser typically uses in a page search.

This metadata is a brief description of what the content is about to encourage visitors to open the page.

Keyword metadata: This metadata is often used for search engine ranking tabulation. Keyword metadata usually contains about three to seven phrases comprising one to four words per phrase.

Links With Other Authoritative Sites

An authoritative, unbiased, and content-rich web page that helps visitors become more informed about their interests will likely attract links from other websites. These external links can help improve a website’s SEO.

Operators of inmate search websites can improve their web page’s credibility and authority by adding relevant and informative links within the page content.

For example, links containing a “click here” text might contain little search engine value.

However, links with keywords such as “Bureau of Prisons inmate statistics” can help improve a page’s search engine rankings and the ranking of the page to which the link redirects.