If you’re searching for the Polk County Iowa Assessor website, you’ve got a few options to choose from.  In my opinion, it should be a lot easier to find a site like this…and once you find it, you’d expect it to look professional - right?  Well, let’s go searching.

For starters, I did a search for Polk County Iowa (using Google) and the first result was polkcountyiowa.gov.  That seems like a logical url and upon further inspection the website looks official.  From the homepage, I clicked on a javascript menu labeled Offices/Departments and found a link titled County Assesser.  Seems pretty easy so far, and the link takes you to polkcountyiowa.gov/assessor.  Bingo…this must be it!  Even the content makes it obvious that you’ve made it to the right place, stating that the “assessor web site is a hit”.  We’ll up until here, it is!

From this page, nearly all of the links take you to a subpage of www .co.polk.ia.us.  So what’s the address of the Iowa Polk County Assessors Office?  We’ll, it’s none other than www.access.co.polk.ia.us.  Nice address!  Not quite as easy to recall as polkcountyiowa.gov, is it?  Not sure that I’ve seen an address with so many dots.  Not sure who came up with this kind of national subdomain system, but thank goodness for bookmarks and favorites.  (The ia.us domain has over 500,000 web pages…only about 25% of the ca.us domain, but that’s another episode.)

So, if you get a bit more specific in your search for the Polk County IA Assessor - the current first result gets you to the correct site.  Without over 300 inbound links to the assessor’s homepage, Google likely wouldn’t have ranked the site so well.  For starters, the title of the homepage doesn’t even include the word County (polk/des moines assessor - homepage).  And, since Google can’t see the image on the homepage - it would help to have more than one instance of Polk on the page…and the word County would also be a nice addition.  This is the power of inbound links.  In any case, the site could use some improvements in terms of aesthetics, navigation, and usability.  It looked the same in 1999 ( http://web.archive.org/web/19991201191320/http://www.assess.co.polk.ia.us/index.html ).

I wonder how many people click on the second result in Google…title states it’s the Official Polk County Website…but it seems a bit outdated ( http://www.co.polk.ia.us:8080/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=199 ) - by about 5 years.  These pages should be removed from the site, or 301 redirected at the very least.  It shouldn’t be this hard to find the polk county assessors office web site.

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