Page 103 - GIGW2
P. 103
Guidelines
for Indian Government Apps & Websites
Website Promotion
Web is a medium of mass information dissemination. With the exponential growth in
the number of websites, which has even crossed the one billion mark, the question of
visibility on the Internet/Web has assumed critical significance.
The ultimate aim of any Government website should be to provide information and
services to as many citizens as possible. The existence of any Government site lying
inaccessible on the web is meaningless. For this purpose a conscious and concentrated
effort has to be made to increase the reach of the website.
Therefore, the importance of website promotion, especially in the context of Government
websites which aim to reach the largest possible number of citizens and stakeholders
cannot be overemphasised.
9.1
Search Engine Optimisation
People usually search for a website through search engines. Therefore searching for a site
in a search engine by using the Department name or the services offered by it as keywords
should preferably bring the website in the first five results on major search engines.
In order to achieve this, the following guidelines may be followed:
9.1.1 The Page Title should include useful and distinctive indication of the contents
and should be self-explanatory. The HTML title should be chosen carefully
considering its role in search engine indexing, query responses, window title bar
and in bookmark labels. (Ref. 2.1.6)
9.1.2 Department name, services offered, schemes, location etc. should form a part of
the Meta information (meta tags) of the HTML page. The important meta tags
that MUST be included are keywords and description tag. These tags are present
in the <head> portion of the html page and while they are not displayed as part
of the page content in web, search engines can read them.
9.1.3 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 meta tag should be used to
provide guidance to search engines on what to present to the users in the search
response.
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