Fang Wang and Ying Wang
said that their " online polity‐ask platform " didn`t adopt any special promotional strategies but news and reports on mass media and interpersonal communications among platform users, and have produced good results.
The other type of promotion channel is the internet, including blogs, BBS, micro blog, SNS, encyclopedia of search engines, Q & A, net favorites, bookmarks, etc.( Cui, 2011). Search engines like Baidu has optimized most of the government portals and ranked them top in search results, but some small‐sized government websites failed to receive such special treatments. SEO is a frequently adopted strategy that improves the ranking of a target website in the retrieval results of a search engine by utilizing its technical rules. SEO for government websites includes two types of strategies: internal SEO and external SEO. Internal SEO includes website structure design, website code optimization, internal link optimization, website content optimization, keyword optimization( including the use of long‐tail theory), navigation design, and optimization of website user experiences, etc. External SEO includes outside link optimization and external data analysis, etc.
3.4.3 Effects of government website promotion
Low utilization is not equivalent to low utilization rate. When we talk about low utilization of a government website, we should specify the maximum number of potential visitors over a given period. If we also know the number of potential users of a government website, it is a relatively simple matter to evaluate its utilization rate and to judge whether its utilization really is low.
Interviewees generally agreed that page view is a valid indicator for measuring the effectiveness of government website promotion. In addition, revisiting times and staying time can also reflect the attraction of a website. However, clicks can ' t fully reflect the actual profits brought by a promotional strategy. The number of affairs that have been processed online successfully and comments of actual users could be taken as indicators. The effectiveness of a specific strategy can be measured by the change of the values of these indicators before and after promotion is implemented.
4. Conclusion
A grounded theory is generated from the data by constant analytical comparison( Glaser and Strauss, 1967). A grounded theory is a holistic conceptual framework instead of a set of research findings. In view of the insufficient research on the low awareness and low utilization of government websites at present, this study adopted grounded theory approach. By iteratively comparing and analyzing the interview data, a grounded theory of government website promotion is concluded as follows:
The public nature of governments determines the essence of their websites. In order to provide public information and services efficiently, government websites need to adopt non‐commercial promotion measures. Because different government websites burden different responsibilities, have different intended users, and are limited by special development stages, understandings of the superiors and budgets, they should choose suitable promotional strategies according to their practical situations. In general, powerful functions are foundation of government website promotion. As public organizations, governments could employ traditional media and adopt free online promotional means, especially SEO to improve the awareness and utilization of their websites. In addition, the evaluation of the effectiveness of government website promotion should not only focus on page views, but also pay more attention to public satisfaction and practical transactions that have been fulfilled via government websites.
Acknowledgements
Our thanks to all the interviewees, and the the National Natural Science Foundation of China for supporting us to finish this research as a part of the project“ Information Access of Chinese Migrant Farmer Workers and the Construction of Inter‐regional Public Information Service System for Them”( Grant No. 71173121), the project“ Holistic Evaluation Research on E‐Government Based on Multi‐stakeholder Value‐focused Approach” supported by the Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences Program of Ministry of Education, China( Grant No. 10YJA870021), and the Special Funds Project for Basic Research of Nankai University“ Theory Construction and Evaluation on Social Information Welfare”.
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