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Search evangelist Adam Lasnik will venture from Silicon Valley to the Capitol Beltway and deliver a session about drawing traffic from Google. The announcement posted at the FirstGov portal, cited in a Webmaster.com thread...

Does Government SEO Differ From Civilian?
...will welcome attendees to "Optimizing Your Websites for Google Search."

FirstGov lists this class as part of its Web Manager University series. The three-hour class will be held at Catholic University in Washington, DC (the Metro stop is Brookland-CUA for those who would rather face a rabid wolverine in a locked bathroom than drive in DC traffic).

It looks like a bargain at $30, but priority has been given to government employees over contractors or non-government professionals. The course material might look like old hat to many of our readers, but for government web developers it may be the first time some will learn the difference between a 301 redirect and directions to Maryland state highway 301.

The class invites all levels of people, from beginner to advanced, to participate in the course. A list of the seminar topics appears on the information page:

Understanding search engines and search engine results (25 minutes)
Building crawlable, indexable, and well-ranked sites (45 minutes)
Tools, tricks and troubleshooting (35 minutes)
Break (10 minutes)
Webspam --what it is, how to avoid it, how to report it, etc. (10 minutes)
Live site evaluations (45 minutes)
Questions & Answers (45 minutes)
Exposure to this information can benefit the taxpaying public as well as the government attendees at the course. The federal government produces a staggering amount of information, and any efforts that can make a particular piece of relevant data available more easily to a searcher helps everyone.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.