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Service Portal › Configure UIs and portals › Configure user experiences
Release: Australia · Updated: 2026-03-12 · Official documentation · View source

Improving search engine optimization for portals

Search engine optimization (SEO) helps portal users find the information they need and be more engaged with your portal. Adding SEO information to your public portal pages improves how external search engines index and rank pages to make them more findable.

You can add the following types of information to Service Portal pages to improve SEO:

  • Human readable keywords in URLs.
  • Meta tags that include information about the page or portal in the <head> section of a page.
  • Dynamic page titles that are descriptive of the page contents.
  • hreflang tags that specify all the available languages of a page.
  • Canonical URLs that specify which pages to index from sets of duplicate URLs.

To improve SEO for your portal further, you can also define and automatically generate XML sitemaps for search engines to index using the Sitemap Generator application.

Some portal pages load data from a record that's specified by a parameter in the URL. For these pages, you can use dynamic page variables to add meta tags, page titles, and human readable URL keywords that vary depending on the record loaded in the page.

Using a Service Catalog page as an example, the following URL includes a sys_id parameter in addition to the page ID. Different content loads on the page depending on the value of the sys_id parameter, which specifies a catalog item record.

https://<instance>/sp?id=sc_cat_item&sys_id=c3b9cbf29716cd1021983d1e6253afad

In this example, the sys_id is for the iPad pro catalog item. The sc_cat_item page has been configured to generate a dynamic title and dynamic keywords in the URL based on the Name field of the catalog item record.

Image omitted: dyn-page-ex.png
Dynamic page title and URL keywords based on the catalog item sys\_id specified by the URL parameter
  • Add human readable keywords to page URLs
    Add human readable keywords to the URLs of portal pages to improve search engine optimization (SEO) and click-through rates and help users understand what to expect on the page.
  • Add meta tags to a public page
    Improve the searchability of Service Portal pages by adding meta tags. You can add the meta name and description attributes to a page, define the robots attribute, or create dynamic meta tags for pages that load record data based on a URL parameter.
  • Add dynamic titles to a page
    Create variables to generate descriptive titles depending on the content loaded into a page.
  • Configure the main tag on a page
    Specify the main content of a page to include in the <main> tag to improve search engine optimization and accessibility.
  • Enable SEO for localized versions of a portal page
    Allow users to discover portal pages in their preferred language by adding hreflang tags.
  • Sitemap Generator
    Use the ServiceNow® Sitemap Generator application to define and automatically generate XML sitemaps to improve search engine optimization of public portal pages.

Parent Topic:Service Portal