People usually search for a website and reach it through search engines. Therefore searching for a site in a search engine by using the agency, board or council name or the services offered by it as keywords must bring the website in the first page of results on major search engines.

• The page title should include useful and distinctive indication of the contents and should be self-explanatory. The HTML “TITLE” element should be chosen carefully considering its role in search engine indexing, query responses, window title bar and in bookmark labels.
• The name of the agency that owns the website, services offered, schemes, location etc. should form a part of the Meta information (metatags) of the HTML page.
• The important metatags that must be included are the following:
  • title tag
  • keywords tag
  • description tag
• Metatags values may be different on each page as needed.
• Search engines often display the first few lines of a Web page to help searchers to identify the sites they want to visit. The description metatag should be used to provide guidance to search engines on what to present to the users in the search response
• Search engines only consider some limited number of keywords when indexing pages. Government websites should present keywords in priority order and without much duplication in the same page.
• As far as possible, the content of the web page should be in textual form, including hyperlinks.
• Content utilizing Flash should be kept to a minimum.
• Non-textual elements should have text alternatives, see section Text Alternatives for Non-Text Content.
• Proper HTML structure elements should be used to highlight important points/program/schemes etc.
  Example:

  - H1-H6 heading tags for titles
  - STRONG tag for bold
  - P tag for paragraphs
• Links text should be specific.
  Example:

  Instead of just ‘Our Program’ a link saying ‘The Program of Department name’ will be more favorable for a search engine.
• Inbound links from external websites increases the weight of the site, and consequently improves its ranking in search results. Thus, links should be exchanged between related government websites.
• Robots.txt file should be used to define what directories and files should / should not be indexed by search engines.
• XML sitemaps should be created and submitted. This helps make sure that the search engine knows about all the pages, including URLs that may not be discoverable by normal crawling process.
• URL rewrite techniques should be implemented, so that URLs with complicated query strings are converted to friendly formats that can be both, more efficiently indexed by search engines and easily understood by visitors.
• Internal cross-links should be provided between the various sections of the government website. This provides the user with the ability to move from one page to another, thus increasing the website visibility and traffic.
• Content should be updated regularly.
• Traffic analysis tools should be regularly used to identify the common search terms used to reach a website and then modifying the website content accordingly. Services of third party search engine optimization companies may be considered, due to the nature and complexity of performing such tasks.