Australian Local Government Association

December 2003

Executive summary

To improve the chances of information discovery by the customer, council websites will require a number of enhancements to be made. As government and commercial search engines operate differently, changes required to the council websites to accommodate both approaches have been identified.

To facilitate searches within government search engine portals, the council websites need to include metadata tags within the HTML script. To achieve this, there are a number of metadata tools available that will either:

• Automatically generate metadata and keywords based on predefined rules. This is ideal for councils that cannot manually add metadata to their websites. This however is a very expensive option.
• Allow users to enter the metadata for a website through an application, with the application automatically applying this to the web pages. Depending on the requirements, the product may be free or cost up to a few thousand dollars.

To facilitate searches within commercial search engines, the council websites need to ensure that the main keywords are located within the title and first couple of paragraphs. Also, there need to be many links to the website from other government websites to improve the ranking (importance) of the page.

This document suggests a number of changes that could be applied to each of the council websites to improve the chances of information discovery. These suggestions should be treated as a guide only. Before any changes are made, each website needs to have further investigation to determine the most appropriate changes required for the desired level of discoverability. This would be based on a cost-benefit basis. Some of the recommended changes will require a small amount of effort, whereas other changes would require much rework of the website.

Download the Meta data tools and analysis documents

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