Do you regularly review your web content to make sure its correct and up to date? The public trusts U.S. Government websites to provide current and accurate information. Are you doing all you can to ensure that trust is well deserved?
One way to build trust with your visitors is to implement a website wide content review process. Yes, it takes time, but it is critical to your credibility. Visitors expect and deserve accurate information on your website, and regular reviews will help keep your content ship-shape!
Lay the groundwork for success
- Ask each manager to designate a web coordinator for their office the person who will manage the content review for their office, and work with you to update content.
- Assign an owner to every page on your site. The owner is usually the office that created the page, and they must be responsible for maintaining their content. Don't post it and forget it!
Conduct regular reviews
- Develop a regular review schedule. so content reviews become a standard business practice at your agency.
- Send your web coordinators a list of pages (URLs) before each review cycle, so they know exactly which pages they are responsible for reviewing.
A website costs money. In most cases, government websites are paid for with tax dollars. The public trusts us to make sure their tax dollars are well spent. It's your job, as a government web manager, to make sure your website is written and designed well, that visitors can use it easily, that it's accurate, and that it's contributing to the achievement of your agency's mission. You need to evaluate and test your website routinely to make it more efficient, appropriate, and useful to your visitors.
The best way to improve the effectiveness of a Web site is to have data that indicates how it's performing. Many measures can be used to improve your website. Web managers no longer need to rely on conjecture, opinions, hunches, personal preferences, or other subjective information. Decisions can be based on data and research.
Organizing content based on your audience's needs is a best practice for managing your agency's website. Your primary form of navigation should be one of the following: - by subject
- task or service
- audience group
- by geographic location
- by any combination of these factors
Because navigation by organizational structure has traditionally been less effective for web users, you should use this as an alternative -- not primary -- form of navigation. - Usability tests and customer satisfaction reviews indicate that most web visitors--both citizens and other audience groups--are familiar with navigating websites by subject, audience, or location.
- Focus groups and other feedback indicate that citizens do not know--nor do they want to know--how the government is organized to get the information and services they want. Creating navigation according to organizational structure is not the best way to design a website for citizens.
- If a federal website is available to anyone, then citizens--as a whole--are part of the audience and the website must be organized in ways that help them use it.
Implement- Use a variety of ways to determine the best way to organize information for citizens and your other customers. See our getting to know your audience page for examples of how to do this.
- Once you know your audiences preferred methods for navigating your site, you need to build an overall organizational structure for your site. This is sometimes referred to as a "taxonomy" or "information architecture."
According to Sharad Verma of Yahoo! look for they are progressing out some new features extra in their algorithm to rank websites in after those coming days. SO be complete to see a few changes in your yahoo rankings.
Advantage of Yahoo announces hold for X robot tags in http headers for no index, noindex, nofollow and nosnippet functions. Previously you can use these tags within html only except from now on you be able to use it in http header which gives you more flexibility to attain exclusions on PDF, Word papers, PowerPoint, video and other file types counting html files. Here are some examples of using X robot Tags given by yahoo:
* X-Robots-Tag: NOINDEX -- If you don't want to show the URL in the Yahoo! look for results.
Note: We'll still need to move gradually the page to see and apply the tag, so if you don't wish to have the page crawled, use robots prohibit on robots.txt.
* X-Robots-Tag: NOARCHIVE -- If you don't want to show cache link in the explore results page.
* X-Robots-Tag: NOSNIPPET -- If you don't want to display review in the search results of that page.
* X-Robots-Tag: NOFOLLOW -- If you don't feel like Yahoo! to crawl links in the page.
If you have a little business website, probability are at a few stage you'll have wondered which "keywords" or "keyword phrases" to comprise within your WebPages. At Bytestart, we forever ensure that our satisfied matches the keywords we are interested in - and hope the main search engines rank our pages accordingly. Simply wadding a webpage occupied of your favourite keywords will do nothing for your search engine visibility.
Althought the "keyword" Meta tag is not consideration to be of great importance to Google (the Title tag being much more important), the phrases used throughout each webpage article will be picked up and used to determine how relevant the search engine thinks your page is for a given search term.
Finding good keywords and phrases is an significant area of web marketing, but how on earth do you locate out which phrases are suitable for your site, and which are way too aggressive to even bother with.
Keyword Suggestion Tools
Good keywords are frequently searched for (high demand) but not being embattled by many other websites (low competition). There are a number of tools out there that can help you discover them.
Probably the best known keyword proposition tool out there, Word tracker aims to help site owners recognize keywords which are most relevant to their business, and which web surfers are most likely to type into search engines. Word tracker has a database of over 300m search terms, so is widely measured to provide a fairly accurate view of present search trends.
Once you type in the phrases you think will be accepted, Word tracker will come back with a score based on the number of users searching for with the purpose of phrase. You'll be staggered how another way people search compared to how you perceive they will search.
How can you verify and process your Search Engine Optimization efforts? The quickest and in all probability the cheapest way is by analyze your web traffic statistics. You have a combine of ways to do this:
Your hosting company may offer you with website data that you can simply view. This - when free- tends to be necessary information and is probably sufficient in most cases.
You can download your log files and use your own web log analyzer tool. This way, as long as your log files contain all the essential data, you can pick and choose the website data you are interested in. Log files are normally generated by excluding extensive information which only superior users and webmasters find useful.
You will have realized that basically having more traffic does not mean that you are doing well. You need to spot behaviors of your guests. Are they following the path you want them to follow? Foremost to the outcome that you need?
Having said that, the more guests you have, the more accurate your explanation will be. The more precise your behaviour investigation will be. Otherwise there is a danger of taking the incorrect action on the explanation of only a few visitors.
Examine your keywords and phrases to see if these are visitors that you want. Perhaps trends have altered and people are using a little different keywords and phrases to those they were using only a few months ago. Perhaps your page requirements to be re-optimized to reflect the pleased it represents.
If you obtain your content right, societal media sites can send 10's of thousands of guests to your site in a small space of time. But how much traffic do these social media sites actually send?
I have been communication to a couple of friends and looking at some of my client stats and have get nearer up with a rough guide to how many unique visitors on average you can be expecting to get from a popular story on some of the top social tagging and news sites. I have worked out my estimates mostly from Google Analytics.
Social news site Digg is famous for crashing servers, this is mainly because of the volume of visitors it sends in such a short freedom of time when a submission 1st hits the frontpage.
Providing you have some crash news or a story that will attention the community Reddit is a sure obsession for a quick burst of visitors. The amount of visitors a popular link receives will depend on how far up the frontpage it goes and how extended it stays there for.
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