SEO for Federal Agencies
Search engine optimization is being mandated by the U.S. Senate and coming to a federal agency website near you? Required-by-law search engine optimization is getting closer and closer. Website accessibility and government search engine optimization isn’t new, and this post covers the pathway to required SEO.
Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act mandated that federal agencies maintain their websites in a fashion that made them accessible to people with disabilities. In most cases, the mandate and subsequent information on how to create an accessible website should have brought the text-heavy government websites into the tops of the search engine ranks for relevant searches. But being text-heavy isn’t optimizing a site for search engines and users.
So what actually happened was masses of information remained hidden in databases accessible only through forms and scripts, and sites built on content management systems that created multiple session IDs and URL parameters continued to be “uncrawlable” by the search engine spiders.
Along comes Google, which has been working with government agencies to implement sitemaps to make their information and services more visible and accessible to search engines/users. And now, the United States Senate has introduced a reauthorization and amendment to the E-Government Act of 2002, called the E-Government Reauthorization Act of 2007. In this amendment, it states,
Not later than 1 year after the date of enactment of the E-Government Reauthorization Act of 2007, the Director shall promulgate guidance and best practices to ensure that publicly available online Federal Government information and services are made more accessible to external search capabilities, including commercial and governmental search capabilities. The guidance and best practices shall include guidelines for each agency to test the accessibility of the websites of that agency to external search capabilities.
In other words, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has to develop guidance documents and establish best practices for government agencies to improve their search engine crawlability and establish guidelines on how to test that crawlability all within one year of the act being passed.
In addition, two years after that, the federal agencies must comply with the guidelines established.
Now, Barry Schwartz states, “it is possible that SEO will become the law for US Federal agencies.” Don’t be fooled into thinking improving crawlability is all it takes to SEO. Search engine optimization is more than enabling search engine spiders to crawl your site, and Barry knows this just as well as any SEO. Could elements of SEO appear in these guidelines and best practices? I would hope that the Office of Management and Budget will convene a committee of SEO consultants to help produce these documents, and not hire an SEO consultant by means of a GSA contract without an outside expert vetting the contractor.
I know a GSA Contractor who claims to be able to do the following, and who just recently, had absolutely NOBODY on staff capable of doing most aspects of these services:
Website Design and Maintenance Services, Search Engine Development, E-mail Marketing, Interactive Marketing, Web Based Training, Web Casting, Video Conferencing via the web, Section 508 compliance: including Captioning Services, On-Line Media Management, Related activities to electronic marketing services.
I don’t put all of the blame on the contractor, however. Part of the problem lies in the GSA IT Labor Category Descriptions, which don’t lend themselves well to search engine development, email marketing, section 508 compliance, or online media management.
I’d hope the bill passes, and someone in the OMB reads this post and passes it on so they don’t spend a fortune on a contractor who doesn’t know what they’re doing. Besides my own expertise, I can name my employer/colleagues and the team at Bruce Clay as very capable consultants in the SEO arena.
