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Ensuring Your Site Is Discoverable Via Victoria Online

"Victoria Online - The fastest way to find local, state and Australian government information and services"

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Overview

Victoria Online is a metadata-driven portal that acts as a government entry point for Victorians. It is funded and managed by the State Government of Victoria and provides Victorians with access to relevant Commonwealth, State and Local government information and services.

Victoria Online is literally a search engine for government, using metadata that has been catalogued for government entry point pages to support precision in the discovery of government information and services via the portal’s search engine and navigational structure.

Purpose of this document

This document aims to give you information and tips to help you make your site more discoverable in Victoria Online.

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What is discoverability?

Discoverability is the effective ability of a website to connect users to the information and resources it holds. It is a key driver of Victoria Online and an important foundation for information architecture and best practice in the online space.

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Why is discovery via Victoria Online important?

By ensuring that your website is discoverable in Victoria Online, you benefit from an increased profile to the average 141,000* users who visit Victoria Online every month.

Victoria Online leads users to your web site by providing strong browse and search capabilities that allow users to find what they need without having to know the structures and functions of government.

* Average number of unique visitors for 2008 (Source: Google Analytics).

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Metadata and Victoria Online

Victoria Online has its own metadata schema, the Victoria Online Metadata Application Profile (VOMAP). VOMAP is an extended version of the Australian Government Locator Service (AGLS) metadata schema and has been specifically developed to suit the cataloguing and user interface needs of Victoria Online. VOMAP is not designed for use by other websites.

Victoria Online uses VOMAP to catalogue website entry point pages from across the three tiers of government (State, Federal and Local). Websites are selected and catalogued as entry points or pathways to lower level information services – for example home pages, high hit pages, high profile pages, index pages, service pages and site maps.

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Optimising Your Site for Discovery via Victoria Online

Victoria Online can assist you in making your site discoverable by providing you with advice on metadata creation, keyword selection and general web discoverability principles. We can also review your metadata and give you tips on how you can optimise your site for discovery.

Whether your site is currently being developed, in production or about to be updated, the following issues are important for discoverability.

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Search engine optimisation (SEO)

Much of what you can do to ensure that your site is optimised for discovery via external search engines also applies to Victoria Online. The following tips are good search engine optimisation (SEO) practice:

  • Ensure that your site has a site map or index;
  • Ensure that your site has predominantly plain, content rich HTML;
  • Keep your important pages or information one or two levels below your home page or entry page - search engines don't necessarily harvest the full site so it is good to ensure that relevant and high profile materials is readily available;
  • Incorporate keywords in your content and image tags to increase the keyword density, and subsequently full text density, of your pages;
  • Check your URL structures and ensure that search engines are able to spider your site - characters such as spaces, square brackets and semi-colons can create problems with some search engine spiders;
  • Remove any barriers that prevent spidering and indexing your site, for example the robots no follow tag.

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Redirects and aliases

Victoria Online only catalogues actual URLs in preference to redirects and aliases for the following reasons:

  • When a user follows a redirect or alias, they are prevented from being able to click the Back button to get back to Victoria Online.

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Frames

Frames should not be used as most external search engines, have difficulties in spidering website content displayed within a frameset.

Victoria Online generally uses the URL of the content of a framed page, rather than the non-unique URL of the frame, as this allows us to catalogue unique content specific to a particular URL.

If a user follows that URL from a Victoria Online search or browse, they will be served a page with no header and, in most instances, no onward navigation. This results in the user not knowing whose site they are in, and hampers further discovery within that site.

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PDFs

Large PDFs compromise the user’s experience by being too slow to download. If your PDF is greater than 2.5mb, break it up into smaller PDFs.

It is also important to highlight here the value of PDF file properties. These properties act as metadata for PDF files and are used by search engines, including Victoria Online, to provide the files' titles and descriptions in search result sets. Failure to update a PDF file’s properties can lead to garbled or incorrect titles and descriptions in search results.

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Site Presentation and Structure

Victoria Online is not responsible for the presentation and structure of the sites it catalogues. Nevertheless, sites that are visually pleasing and easy to navigate greatly improve the user experience, which can lead to improving their ability to discover your information.

Best practice and standards

There are a number of frameworks and standards available that can assist you in making your site effective, usable and discoverable. The Website Management Framework offers guidelines on a number of important areas such as accessibility, minimum information provision and legal compliance. Further useful references can be found at the end of this document.

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Metadata Cataloguing Do’s and Don'ts

There are a number of ways in which you can improve discoverability of your site through your own metadata cataloguing practices:

  • Do ensure that your site's pages have AGLS compliant metadata, in particular those entry point pages that are catalogued by Victoria Online.
  • Do make your metadata as relevant as possible - the more relevant and accurate your metadata is, the more discoverable your site will be.
  • Do ensure that the metadata for DC.Title, DC.Description and DC.Subject is relevant for the page and contains those keywords citizens might use in looking for your information. This is particularly important for those entry point pages that are catalogued by Victoria Online, but good practice in general. Our cataloguers use this metadata as a starting point for creating Victoria Online’s metadata records, and also as a source of keywords for maintaining the Victoria Online Thesaurus.
  • Do ensure that your web page titles are relevant and provide context for the user. Victoria Online (as do other search engines) uses the titles of your web pages for the DC.Title used in discovery and as a display in our results sets for searching and browsing. A good rule of thumb is to visualise the page title as a title in a Victoria Online results set – does the title provide enough information for the user to know, at a high level, what the page is about?
  • Do spend time composing quality keyword-rich content, using your top search terms, for the DC.Description element on each page.
  • Don’t create generic metadata records across your whole site, as it doesn’t support discovery and provides limited context to the user. Think of your site like a magazine with a number of articles – the articles may have some topics in common, especially if the magazine is about a broad subject or activity, but usually each article will have a specific focus and therefore needs to be treated individually. Ensure that each page on your site has metadata that is appropriate for that page’s content.
  • Don’t copy the keyword content for DC.Subject into DC.Description. This is not best practice and offers no benefit to Victoria Online. Use the DC.Description to provide a clear summary of the page's content, which will assist Victoria Online in ensuring that your site pages have relevant descriptions in results sets.

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Review your records on Victoria Online

At any time, you can review the pages of your site that have been catalogued on Victoria Online, either by visiting the site or by asking us to send you a summary list. Let us know what you think. Some things to check:

  • Are your pages catalogued where you would expect them to appear in the navigational (browse) structure?
  • Are your pages discoverable when using your keywords to search for them?
  • Do the summary records, in particular the titles and descriptions, appearing for your pages give effective coverage of the pages being described and the services offered to users?
  • Are there any additional pages we should catalogue?

We encourage you to do this, as it ensures that we keep your information on our site accurate and relevant.

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Keep Victoria Online Informed

Victoria Online tries to ensure that your site's information is always accurate, but you can greatly assist us by informing us of any recent, upcoming or planned changes to your site. We can then minimise the impact of that change on discoverability within Victoria Online. Let us know if your site is:

  • being restructured
  • changing in context
  • changing its URL structures
  • deleting or adding key pages
  • being launched as a new site
  • being decommissioned

We can then work with you to ensure that the changes are promptly reflected on Victoria Online.

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Quick Tips

  • Avoid using frames on your site where possible
  • Ensure that PDFs are no larger than 2.5 MB
  • Complete the document properties information for all PDFs
  • Remove any barriers to the Victoria Online spider
  • Ensure that your site has a site map and/or index
  • Aim for a site that has predominantly plain content rich HTML
  • Keep important information on pages 1 or 2 levels below your entry point page
  • Ensure that your site is visually pleasing and easy to navigate
  • Ensure that your site has AGLS compliant metadata
  • Ensure that the content within the DC.Title, DC.Description and DC.Subject elements are relevant to the content of the page
  • Ensure that your metadata and page content is keyword-rich
  • Ensure compliance with the Website Management Framework
  • Inform Victoria Online of recent or planned changes to your site

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References

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Further Information

Contact:
eServices Unit
Information Victoria
Department of Business and Innovation
Level 20, 80 Collins Street, Melbourne. VIC. 3000
Email: infovic@dbi.vic.gov.au
Telephone: 61 3 9938 0512

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Added: 17 October 2005 Page views: 17,420 Rating: 5 Votes: 1
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Last updated: 6 May 2011
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