I agree that the bulk of the traffic will be search referrals, but I was trying to get across the idea (probably not very articulately) that an agency (or an individual, for that matter) reputation is not solely about what Google returns. It is also a function of your social media profile: your rel tags, your bookmarks, your networks — all of these things comprise your profile.

I think the discussion about SEO is definitely one that needs to be expanded and shared.

Do public sector organisation have an appreciation of the key word searches of areas they are responsible for?

By way of an example: would specific public sector organisations want to use their massive sway (in terms of PageRank) to be first in the results for a search for information on:
benefit cheats
environmental devastation
public sector pay rates

I have gone searching for these results, but SEO techniques would make a real and tangible difference to the relevant agency’s web cut through in these areas.

I feel it is much easier to manage reputations from the front of the queue, given the variance in natural traffic generated by the first result in a google search compared with the last.

I agree: but this comes back to the point about the tendency of agencies to take their page rank for granted — they are already dealing to the front of the queue (albeit inadvertently) as they see it. By broadening their approach, they can start curating their reputation with the people in the other queues, ie., those not coming in through Google or Yahoo etc.

I guess I am saying that if we keep seeing the trend towards social media powered referrals, then you should be actively managing that part of your profile.

I accept that SEO is only a part of a wider process. However, I feel it is much easier to manage reputations from the front of the queue, given the variance in natural traffic generated by the first result in a google search compared with the last.

I completely agree about the importance of SEO, and I suspect that – because of their ‘default’ pageranks – most agencies either don’t care or feel they don’t need to…

It is important to look beyond SEO and to consider your whole profile as part of your online reputation; but maybe that is a concept that we will have to move a little more slowly towards?

The lack of even rudimentary SEO is not limited to the public sector in New Zealand IMHO.

For example I have a competitor who does not even have the key words for the services they offer on the home page of their site at all. I suppose they assume that google will just guess what they offer… Don’t get me wrong their site looks lovely, but it is very hard to find with a search of the services they offer in google.

I am in the middle of a project to optimise NZPA’s current web content and this will be the fourth organisation I have led through this process. But once key words have been staked out, they get entrenched with inbound links and it becomes very difficult to unseat incumbents

The other important point about SEO for communication activities, is all content should be optimised for search engines, even for text sent via traditional post, or sound bytes given to radio stations as sooner or later, all content ends up on the web.

SEO 101 in five easy steps
1) Define who you are wanting to communicate with
2) Define key words those people would most likely use when looking for your information
3) Use those keywords on the title of the page, on the headline and twice in the first paragraph if possible.
4) If the communication is through a web page beg steal or borrow as many links to that page as you can and make sure the keywords appear between all of the <a> tags and in title element linking to that page (including the links to that page from other organisation’s sites). Extra for experts would be including the keywords in the URL for the page, separated by hyphens.
5) Go and have a cheeseburger (*looks despairingly at Che and shakes head*)

Government sites, because of what they are, have PageRanks that I can only dream of, and these immensely powerful tools need to be managed carefully.

Done properly a public sector organisation can obtain huge communication leverage from their web assets using SEO techniques.

I should get my own blog.

In short, it’s your whole online profile that has to be curated…