Thanks to Ian Dunmore and Dan Champion for inviting me to speak at their Public Sector Forums event in Birmingham. I was given the task of explaining how the Internet really works, and what the public sector could be doing to  increase accessibility in the broadest terms to their content – basically search and SEO for the public sector, getting their content in front of their customers (us citizens).

Dan was up first talking about best practice in public sector website design and accessibility and sussed that the audience was made up of around 5-6 web monkeys, 30 or so web manager types and the rest were communications and other management, so a pretty relevant bunch.

To start off I did a hands in the air, out of a room of 50 public sector webmaster / web managers / communications people from all across the UK:

How many of you have an SEO strategy?
....deafening silence....
or search anywhere in your strategy?
....a lone hand goes up at the back....

                    ONE!!!

1 out of 50. I nearly fainted. Given that one of their primary remits is making information easier for us to access it's unbelievable. The rest of my talk was about how users used the internet, what search engines they used and how they worked, and how internet users interact with the search engines. Next I talked through some SEO theory and quick wins, I also highlighted the major differences between the tough accessibility and meta data standards their websites have to conform to and sound basic SEO theory, to summarise:

Does it matter if a website validates perfectly…no, does it matter if your eGMS v3.1 IPSV subject tags are wrong…no, does it matter if spiders can't actually get to the content…yes.

In preparation for the event I familiarised myself with the standards government websites need to conform to, the more I learnt, the more it really saddened me to think that tax payers money is being wasted pushing these guys into policies that bear no relation to how the Internet really works and normal users interact with it.

Most telling is that they have to now go through retagging all their content with eGMS 3.1 Dublin Core Integrated Public Sector Vocabulary (IPSV)  subject meta tags which no large scale web search engine takes any notice of. In fact no well used search engine ever took notice of the old eGMS tags, so why they bothered updating the standard is beyond me. I just love this quote from the IPSV website, its my new slogan for e-ridiculousness:

"The purpose of the Subject encoding schemes is to make it easier for citizens to find information from all the electronic resources in the UK public sector."
http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/schemasstandards/gcl.asp

Really, seriously, is that what it does?

It appears there's two agendas here, the standards government websites have to conform to interact with each other (even though they are never used anyway) and the standards government websites should be thinking about in order to get their content to us users, which right now are actually non existent.

Most of the attendees also seemed dismayed with the eGov strategy, and some of the tactics of DirectGov, which was generally agreed to be contrary how people wanted to access information. I highlighted how first I'd hated DirectGov but after much deliberation had come to the conclusion it was in fact useful in theory, but was flawed because they used the tactic of routing all their outbound links via redirects, so even though DirectGov had the potential to be the definitive and helpful authorative hub for Government information it wasn't effectively passing its votes to other government websites.

The event was really enlightening, and I enjoyed it greatly. The web managers all seemed keen to be doing much more to make their information easier for us to access which is great, and if they have even taken some of my minor points into consideration the results will be positive.

Now if someone has the keys to number 10 I'll be happy to run through the whole lot again to central government, and help them write some useful policies.