Make your agency website, and the information it offers, easier to find.

As many as four of five Internet users reach government and other public sector websites by using Google and other search engines.* The problem is that such websites often provide access to information, like public records, through a database application, and our "crawlers" generally can't access and thereby index the webpages in these databases. This means that much of the public information on these websites isn't included in Google's index, and that many search engine users could be missing out on the information and services that your website offers.

The good news is that there's a way for you to ensure that Google's crawlers can access all your webpages, including records in databases. It's called the Sitemap Protocol and it provides a mechanism for producing a list of all your webpages and systematically communicating this Sitemap to search engines like Google.

To learn more, view our guide to implementing Sitemaps or read about how government agencies have used Sitemaps to make information on their websites easier to find. If you have questions, check our FAQ or consult Google's Sitemap Protocol discussion group.

*ComScore, July 2006, internal research

Expanding citizen access to government information and services
A guide to implementing Sitemaps

Part 1 Making your website visible through web search	Part 2 Creating Sitemaps to make your website more crawlable	Part 3 Implementing Sitemaps and managing web search with Google Webmaster Tools
Play now (6 min.)	Play now (9 min.)	Play now (5 min.)