This is my first YOUmoz post, so hopefully this is of interest to people!

In my role I look at a lot of Government websites. I recently followed some comments on the LA Times publishing some of their analytics, and upon hearing that some people were surprised this data was being released, it occurred to me that SEOs could get a lot of this data and more from a surprising source: the Government.

You see, there's a lovely thing in the UK called the Freedom of Information Act - and in the US it exists as well.

What does this mean? Well, it means that you can submit a request for information from the Government or a Government body and a high percentage of the time they'll give you it. Say you work in medicine -- just ask the NHS for their analytics data. Travel? Ask the Tourism Boards or the State Department. Most of our niches have public bodies overseeing them and you can get everything from digital strategy documents, linking strategy, and development plans onto analytics data.

Usually what will be declined is data that either is Secret (e.g., aliens, CIA, terrorism, etc) or is gathered from a third party in confidence.

For the UK go here to Direct.gov for further advice, and in the USA here's the Wikipedia reference (sorry, I'm English!). Most public and government bodies actually have a section on their sites telling you how to submit an FOIA request to them.

Hopefully this doesn't cause too much chaos...