hese days, we hear a lot about open data, open government, and Gov 2.0. President Obama’s Open Government directive has given us access to huge data sets through avenues such as data.gov. But we have a lot more assets as a country than just digital 0s and 1s in CSV files. We also have artifacts and science and history and experts. Can open government apply to those assets as well?
A couple of weeks ago at Transparency Camp, I gave a talk on using search data to help ensure that the information the organizations in attendance were opening up could be found by the right audiences. It’s awesome that organizations like the Sunlight Foundation, Open Congress, and Follow the Money are making details about government actions easily accessible by citizens. And the government itself has made great strides in opening up data with sites such as recovery.gov and data.gov.
Read the whole article at O’reilly Radar
When we want to find more information about something, hear about something interesting from our friends, see a compelling television commercial, or need a local mechanic, chances are the first place we turn is the Google search box. Fifty percent of us in the United States use search engines every day and over 90% of us search every month. These days, your search strategy is your business strategy, whether you realize it or not, because that’s how potential customers are trying to find you. Search is the new yellow pages, 800 number, Sunday circular, card catalog, and cash register. No matter what kind of web site you have–whether it’s a media property like a blog, an ecommerce site, or the online arm of multinational corporation–you want to connect with as many of your potential audience as possible, and organic search can help make that happen.
Read more at Radar.oreilly.com.
In an earlier post, I said that key to government opening its data to citizens, being more transparent, and improving the relationship between citizens and government in light of our web 2.0 world was ensuring content on government sites could be easily found in search engines. Architecting sites to be search engine friendly, particularly sites with as much content and legacy code as those the government manages, can be a resource-intensive process that takes careful long-term planning. But
two keys are:
Thursday Congressman Honda asked, “how can congress take advantage of web 2.0 technologies to transform the relationship between citizens and government?” He noted that “A dramatic shift in perspective is needed before that need can be met. Instead of databases becoming available as a result of Freedom Of Information Act requests, government officials should be required to justify why any public data should not be freely available to the taxpayers who paid for its creation.” He asked for input on what web 2.0 features he should add to his website to take advantage of today’s online world.
The most important feature government web sites can add isn’t really feature at all. But it would absolutely transform the relationship between citizens and government and make an amazing array of public data available. What’s this magic feature?
Make government web sites search engine friendly.
Yesterday, as President-elect Obama became president Obama, we geeky types filled the web with chatter about change. That change of change.gov becoming whitehouse.gov, that is. The new whitehouse.gov robots.txt file opens everything up to search engines while the previous one had 2400 lines! The site has a blog! The fonts are Mac-friendly! That Obama administration sure is online savvy.
Or is it?
All kinds of data exists about how your site is doing in search engines and about your potential customers. So much data, in fact, that the thought of making sense of it all can seem a bit daunting.
Web analytics data, keyword research, search trends, search engine tools for webmasters: where do you start?
People often ask me what data they should be paying attention to, but the answer really depends on your situation: What are your goals? What stage is your site in? From that mountain of data, you may only need a few pieces of actionable information to help you measure your current efforts and make adjustments for the future.
Controlling what content is blocked from being found in search engines is crucial for many websites. Fortunately, the major search engines and other well-behaved robots observe the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP), which has evolved organically since the early 1990’s to provide a set of controls over what parts of a web site search engines robots can crawl and index.
A picture is worth a thousand words. Unfortunately, when it comes to major search engines (which are still primarily text-based), a picture is worth a lot of blank space. Does this mean you shouldn’t use images on your site if you want to rank in search? Not at all. Just keep some simple things in mind when adding those images to your pages. As a bonus, these tips help not only with seach engine robots, but with Jane as well! You want your site to be accessible in screen readers, to those who have images turned off in their browsers, and to those who have slow connections or are on mobile browsers and may have trouble loading images.
It’s clear that people are shifting to online resources when looking for local information. Case in point: when Google unveiled universal search earlier this year, which combined results from multiple vertical products for any search from google, it included local results in the short list of five it initially integrated.
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