I’ve never met anyone (aside from my college economics instructor) who was a big fan of paying taxes. Most small business owners dread tax time and for obvious reasons. On the other hand, taxes are good for some things - infrastructure; education; defense - and even have something do to with SEO. Why else would an SEO company start off a blog entry with the mention of taxes? Believe it or not, your tax dollars are going toward something that could lift your website in search engine rankings. The government must spend all of the tax dollars on something; it supplements vast amounts of web content.
Government sources are huge and provide a wide range of information to the public. The documents created by the U.S. federal government fall under the terms of Title 17 United States Code section 105, meaning no copyright protection. However, you should be aware of some exceptions:
- The government may still hold copyrights on works that have been submitted to the government. These documents are usually assignments of some kind.
- Federal law makes all U.S. government works copyright free. Most other government nations hold copyrights on their works.
- The U.S. government hires private and public companies to produce some of their documents. Some of these documents are copyright protected.
- The U.S. Postal Service is exempt from these federal regulations, allowing them to hold copyrights on whatever they choose, like stamps.
Now, don’t think you won’t find content about your industry, services, or products. You’d be surprised by the amount of great content that is out there waiting for you. All it takes is a little searching and you may run into a gold mine of stuff that you could put on your blog or website. Most of the content you might find will be either Web pages or PDF files. You definitely need to transfer any PDF files to HTML. After all, we are gathering this content for website optimization.
You can find a lot of government materials by going to FedWorld, Government Printing Office, Library of Congress, or CIA Electronic Reading Room. Also, you can try the search syntax site:.gov your keywords. For example, typing site:.gov st louis leaf removal into Google’s search engine will show you a leaf & brush program for the neighborhood of Ladue in St. Louis. This might be something you can use if you were a leaf removal service in St. Louis city. Happy hunting!