Government Needs to Prioritize SEO

November 18, 2012

Search Engine Watch recently reported on a federal government initiative to consolidate government domains, websites, and databases in the article, “Government SEO is Broken.”

According to the article, there could be one major hinderance to this operation. The United States government is not taking SEO into account when executing this plan. Since the federal digital presence currently includes more than 1,400 domains and 11,000 websites run by 56 agencies, consolidating is certainly necessary. However, it is also important that the government consider the daunting task of employees needing to search for information in that mess.

The article states:

“Each negative or frustrating online experience contributes to the public perception that government is too large, unresponsive, and indifferent to the needs of its diverse set of stakeholders.

But what if users were able to quickly and easily connect to government directly from the search engines with a minimum of clicks? Instead of visiting a government agency home page, navigating the site, and finally finding the information they need? What if agency activities and perspectives were highly visible and above private sector sites in the search results?”

The fact that government agencies are not number one on search engines like Google and Bing is ridiculous. The federal government needs to take advantage of the preferential treatment it receives by ranking algorithms and make search a priority.

Jasmine Ashton, November 18, 2012

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com

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