I was wondering if anyone has any recommendations for reading material for establishing an effective SEO strategy for public facing govt sites? A long-shot, I know, but any feedback would be appreciated.
Develop amazing content and make it easy to get to. From my experience, all the seo strategy reading you'll do mainly revolves around spending every bit of energy squeezing the last drop of juice out of a smattering of techniques that are continually changing.
The one thing to remember about SEO is that every search engine out there is after one thing: people like you and I sitting in front of a computer being interested enough in the results to read it.
I see a lot of SEO people chasing the search engine. That made absolutely no sense to me. Sure, you want to know how the search engine works, and how some are better than others. But if you chase the search engine, and the search engine is chasing the user, everything you do is subject to change as the search engine gets better at hitting it's target.
If you begin building everything for the end user in mind, the majority of your work gets better as search engines get more sophisticated at figuring out how best to display results for that same user.
The only things I'd like to mention, for those who are new and don't yet know, are:
1) There is no shortage of people touting their systems and products as sure-fire ways to boost your SEO results - as long as you hand over enough of your money. Don't fall for this - if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
2) There are techniques that you pretty much be sure will HURT your SEO rankings - the so-called "black-hat" methods. Learn what these are and avoid them. Some of these are keyword stuffing (fortunately not as common as it used to be), variations of keyword use that involve making them invisible, link farms, and more.
3) Your best bet is to present content that people want to view and present it in a clear and sensible way (meaning don't try to trick the search engines).
I see a lot of SEO people chasing the search engine. That made absolutely no sense to me. Sure, you want to know how the search engine works, and how some are better than others. But if you chase the search engine, and the search engine is chasing the user, everything you do is subject to change as the search engine gets better at hitting it's target.
If you begin building everything for the end user in mind, the majority of your work gets better as search engines get more sophisticated at figuring out how best to display results for that same user.
The only things I'd like to mention, for those who are new and don't yet know, are:
1) There is no shortage of people touting their systems and products as sure-fire ways to boost your SEO results - as long as you hand over enough of your money. Don't fall for this - if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
2) There are techniques that you pretty much be sure will HURT your SEO rankings - the so-called "black-hat" methods. Learn what these are and avoid them. Some of these are keyword stuffing (fortunately not as common as it used to be), variations of keyword use that involve making them invisible, link farms, and more.
3) Your best bet is to present content that people want to view and present it in a clear and sensible way (meaning don't try to trick the search engines).