eGovernment Resource Centre - Victoria, Australia

Victorian
Government
Contact Centre
1300 366 356

Main Menu

Categories, RSS and More

Main Categories

Shorten URL

Please enter the URL that you'd like to shorten or click here to shorten current:


What's this? loading...

Rate this Site

Thanks for visiting. To help us help you find what you need please take our 1 minute Visitor Survey.

Members Forum

The Forum is the place for members to post their opinions and exchange ideas.

Discoverability for Government Websites

Resources to support the Victorian Government Discoverability Standard

The Requirements of the Victorian Government's Discoverability Standard are:

  1. Conduct keyword research to determine the most relevant keywords for users and incorporate the findings into website content and metadata.
  2. Implement unique, descriptive and meaningful page titles for all web pages using the HTML title element.
  3. Implement descriptive and meaningful values for the keywords and description attributes of the HTML meta element on all web pages.
  4. Implement descriptive and meaningful values for the mandatory and recommended properties of the AGLS Metadata Standard (AS 5044‐2010) on all web pages.
  5. Ensure all non-HTML documents have complete, accurate and descriptive document properties.
  6. Register with Victoria Online.
  7. Register with the Open Directory Project (Victorian Government category)
  8. Register with Business Licensing Information Service (where licensing is involved) and/or Health translations directory (where non‐English health information is involved).
  9. Register with external search engines.
  10. Implement and register a discoverable XML sitemap that conforms to the sitemaps.org protocol and/or provide an A-Z HTML index.
  11. Implement the robots.txt protocol for controlling search engine content‐indexing.
  12. Implement one primary domain name and permanent redirects (301 Moved permanently) from alternate domain names.
  13. Implement a website search facility for users.

Requirement

1. Conduct keyword research to determine the most relevant keywords for users and incorporate the findings into website content and metadata.

Why do we do keyword research?

Answer: If you want to be ranked on the first page of search engines results and drive traffic to your website, you need to find the words your target audience uses in search engines to make it easier and quicker for them to find the information and services you are providing.

How to do Keyword Research

Google Keywords Tools

Google Keywords tool - Specify a website, word or phrase, or category to get started.

Google Insights for search - you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties. These examples show some different ways of using the service.

Other keyword tools and resources

2. Implement unique, descriptive and meaningful page titles for all web pages using the HTML title element.

[Meaningful is defined as: full of meaning, significance, purpose, or value]

The <title> tag defines the title of the document - W3Schools

How to write content for the HTML title element

3. Implement descriptive and meaningful values for the keywords and description attributes of the HTML meta element on all web pages.

[Meaningful is defined as: full of meaning, significance, purpose, or value]

The HTML Meta elements for Keywords and Description are specified in the <meta> tag element which resides inside the head element - W3Schools

Meta Description Tag

Its purpose is to describe the page to searchers as they read through the listings in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Google will display around 150-155 characters (including spaces) of description in the search engine snippet below the title link in its SERPs.

The meta description tag looks like this: <meta name="description" content="[This is where your 150 character meta description goes.]" /> in the HTML of your page.

Make sure it is keyword rich (but don't "stuff" it), unique to the website and accurately describes the content on the page. This is your call to action for the searcher to click on your search result.

Examples

Betterhealth.vic.gov.au

Health and medical information for consumers. Includes healthy living, weight management, recipes, physical activity, pregnancy, nutrition, children's health, and a range of information on the symptoms, care and treatment of many health conditions. [248 characters with spaces]

Google truncates this to

Health and medical information for consumers. Includes healthy living, weight management, recipes, physical activity, pregnancy, nutrition, ... [143 characters with spaces]

Could be rewritten as:

Consumer health & medical information including tips for health living & weight management, recipes, illness symptoms, pregnancy & nutrition. [141 characters with spaces]

How to Use it

Meta Keywords Tag

Little weight these days is placed by external search engines on the content within the Meta Keywords Tag. However, some search engines do still use it including Yahoo but the ranking importance is fairly low.

The meta keywords tag looks like this: <meta name="keywords" content="[word, word, phrase, word, phrase....]" />

How to Use It

Resources

4. Implement descriptive and meaningful values for the mandatory and recommended properties of the AGLS Metadata Standard (AS 5044‐2010) on all web pages.

[Meaningful is defined as: full of meaning, significance, purpose, or value]

Metadata is data about data - it is structured data about other data. Resource discovery metadata is structured information describing a resource or collection of resources.

"The aim of the AGLS Metadata Standard is to ensure that users searching the Australian information space on the World Wide Web (Including intranets and extranets) have fast and efficient access to descriptions of many different resources." (AGLS Metadata Standard: Part 2, Usage guide. p.11)

AGLS Metadata

Sections 4.1.2 and 4.1.3 of the AGLS Metadata Standard part 2 usage guide detail the mandatory and conditional metadata properties to be used.

Mandatory properties are:

  • Creator
    • The name of the person or organization responsible for creating the content of the resource. If the creator is not known, se the value as "unknown".
  • Title
    • Ensure the title is meaningful as most search engines will use these in search results. Subtitles should be included in the title value.
  • Date (or related property)
  • Availability (mandatory of offline resources)
    • Primarily used for offline resources to provide information on how you might obtain physical access to the resource. If the resource is available both online and offline, use the identifier property.
  • Identifier (mandatory for online resources)
    • This will only work for resources being described with a persistent, stable URI.
  • Publisher (mandatory for information resources - optional for descriptions of services)
    • Provides information about the ownership of the resource. This may be the same as the creator.

Recommended properties (those required in certain circumstances) are:

  • Description
    • A brief textual description of the content and or purpose of the resource.
    • Strongly recommended for services. Provide a concise description of the content and purpose of the service and identify the problem rather than the solution
  • Function (if subject is not used)
    • Used to describe the business function of the organization to which the described resource relates. It does NOT describe the function of the resource itself.
  • Language (where the language of the resource is not English)
    • Used to describe the language of the content of the resource. Default value for Australian English is "en-AU"
    • May be used to describe all languages in which a service is available.
  • Subject (if function is not used)
    • Choose the most significant and unique subject terms to describe a particular resource. Avoid general non specific terms. Separate terms or phrases by a semi colon
    • Use a thesaurus or controlled vocabulary to ensure consistency.
  • Type
    • Details the aggregation level of a resource and specifies the resource type.

Optional properties are:

  • Audience
  • Contributor
  • Coverage
  • Format
  • Mandate
  • Relation
  • Rights
  • Source

Detailed information is available from the AGLS Metadata Standard: part 2, Usage Guide (PDF 638kb). (This document requires the use of Adobe Acrobat Reader).

Resources

5. Ensure all non-HTML documents have complete, accurate and descriptive document properties.

For example, Word, Excel and PDF documents must have completed document properties to assist search engines in displaying the correct title and description of the document rather than just the document file name in their search results.

Resources:

  • SEO for PDF Documents. Bruce Clay, 18 September 2009. Considers the following issues: formatable text, optimising the text in the PDF document, updating the document title, linking to the PDF, and other PDF optimisation guidelines.
  • Setting Document Properties Factsheet. Government of South Australia, Department of Education and Children's Services, 19 August 2009.
  • View or change the properties for an Office document. Microsoft. " This article explains what document properties are, how you can view or change the properties for a Microsoft Office document, and how you can create custom properties for a document..."

6. Register with Victoria Online

Victoria Online - vic.gov.au is the Victorian Government's main portal/website that helps you find the information and services that exist on other government websites and can then take you directly to those websites. It is both an easy-to-use directory and a powerful search engine. You can find local, state and federal government information and services through Victoria Online (as well as organisations that were previously government-owned), all organised in a way that does not require knowledge of government or the way that government is structured.

Ensuring your site is discoverable via Victoria Online aims to give you information and tips to help you make your site more discoverable in Victoria Online.

To register your site please email infovic@dbi.vic.gov.au with your domain name and brief description of your site.

7. Register with the Open Directory Project (Victorian Government category)

DMOZ - The Open Directory Project is a web directory of Internet resources run by volunteers. Identify the single best category for your site. Once you've selected the best category for your site, go directly to that category on dmoz.org and then click "suggest URL." An ODP editor will review your submission to determine whether to include it in the directory. Once accepted it may take anywhere from 2 weeks to several months for your site to be listed on partner sites which use the Open Directory data, such as AOL Search, Google,Netscape Search, Yahoo Search

The Victorian Government category is located at: http://www.dmoz.org/Regional/Oceania/Australia/Victoria/Government/

The general rule is for the top level domains to be submitted for consideration eg., health.vic.gov.au, transport.vic.gov.au

Adding Deep Links

In certain circumstances Deep Links to sub-pages and sub-domains within a site may be added to the DMOZ directory. However, in the vast majority of categories and branches, deeplinking is the exception rather than the rule.

To be considered, deeplinks should offer content that is unique and extremely useful to a particular category.

Providing deeplinks, in a uniform way, to sites that offer extremely useful and unique content can add value to the directory in a few cases (e.g. categories with very limited content, and where the meat of the available web content is typically buried within larger sites).

If the information about the topic is brief (e.g. only one paragraph about the topic), or if the listings in the category provide more comprehensive and quality information about the topic, then the deep linked content will not be listed since it is not very useful relative to the rest of the category's contents. This sort of deeplink is the exception rather than the rule. Deeplinks of this sort will only be considered from authoritative and high quality resources.

What to consider before submitting a deep link to the Open Directory Project
  • The comprehensiveness of the information provided on the site you are submitting
  • The quality of the information provided
  • Does the information provide new insights to the topic or is this information that is not covered by other listed sites in the same category?
  • The site's content relative to the others listed - does it provide a nice complement or supplement to the sites already listed in the category?

8. Register with Business Licensing Information Service (where licensing is involved) and/or Health translations directory (where non‐English health information is involved).

Business Licensing Information Service

For websites where business licensing is involved, you must ensure that the licences are available via the Registration and Licence Finder application on the Business Victoria website (email client.support@dbi.vic.gov.au or call the Small Business Victoria Data Management team on [03] 9651 7342)

Health Translations Directory

Lists health information that has been translated into other languages that have:

  • state-wide applicability,
  • an English language version available,
  • been translated by an accredited translator,
  • been published or reviewed within the past 5 years

To register your resource contact:
Health Translation Directory Team, 16/50 Lonsdale Street Melbourne , VIC 3000 Australia
Phone: (61 3) 9096 2667, Fax: (61 3) 9096 9190 Email: healthtranslations@dhs.vic.gov.au

9. Register with external search engines.

The following are the major search engines you should consider registering your site with:

  • Google - site submit (Only the top-level page from a host is necessary; you do not need to submit each individual page.)
    • how to remove a site/url from Google (The URL removal tool is intended for pages that urgently need to be removed - for example, if they contain confidential data that was accidentally exposed.)
  • Bing - site submit (BingBot follows links from your homepage to find other pages on your site.)
  • Yahoo - site submit (You can submit a website or web page and/or the full URL of a site feed.)

However, other relevant niche search engines which target your designated audience should also be considered.

10. Implement and register a discoverable XML sitemap that conforms to the sitemaps.org protocol and/or provide an A-Z HTML index.

Create a sitemap to help search engines crawl your site. Sitemaps help search engines index content from you website that is not easily spiderable.

An example of an XML sitemap is one created for the eGovernment Resource Centre - http://www.egov.vic.gov.au/system/user_files/sitemaps/sitemap.xml.gz

Resources

11. Implement the robots.txt protocol for controlling search engine content‐indexing.

Set up a robots.txt file if you need to restrict access to certain parts of your site. This is required only if your site includes content that you don't want search engines to index. According to Google, if you want search engines to index everything in your site, you don't need a robots.txt file.

For more information refer to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard

12. Implement one primary domain name and permanent redirects (301 Moved permanently) from alternate domain names.

301 Redirects are the best way to ensure that your website visitors and search engines are directed to the correct page on your website. This is especially useful for when you either change domain names or change content management systems resulting in new and different URL strings.

You should also permanently redirect from your Non-WWW to your WWW versions of your site or vice a versa. It is bad practice to have both working simultaneously as it could be seen as duplicate content by search engines. eg., Redirect: http://egov.vic.gov.au to http://www.egov.vic.gov.au/.

Lower case URLs are preferred to a mixture of lower and upper case URLs.

See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_301

Resources

13. Implement a website search facility for users.

Site search is one of the most important ways to understand the various behaviours of your website visitors. Visitors who type a search phrase into your site search box are looking for something specific more so than a visitor who browses through your site. Site search users are are looking for something specific and are telling you in their own language what they want. If you give them relevant search results, they are more likely to become returning visitors.You can use this information go build content around what your visitors are seeking.

There are many paid and some free site search services available. One such free service is Google Custom Search.

Google Custom Search

If you don't have site search on your website, a quick way to implement one is to use Google Custom Search. This is free.

The Getting Started guide walks you through the creation of your first custom search engine and gives you a tour of the control panel.

The Developer Guide walks you through the process of creating a custom search engine using the wizard. Later, it shows you how to further customize and add other features to your search engine using Custom Search XML or TSV files.

The Google APIs console also offers a Custom Search API providing search results using your choice of Atom or JSON syndication formats.

Resources

Note: This document is a work in progress - any suggestions for changes and additions are gratefully received.

Email: administration@egov.vic.gov.au

Bookmark and Share

Added: 1 June 2011 Page views: 1,910 Rating: 0 Votes: 0
Review and rate this Article
Last updated: 18 August 2011
1

Related Articles

Discoverability Standard
Discoverability is the degree to which something can be easily found and/or navigated. Ensuring websites are discoverable can have considerable benefits, including: a better web experience for users through efficient, targeted access to information and services; increased traffic to the website from external search engines, portals and other websites; and a means to consistently describe information and services, eg., metadata.
Added: 30 November 2005 Rating: 0.0
Display Full Article »