Usually when people think of internet marketing and Google they think of people trying to make money. Few think of people trying to make presidents. That’s exactly what many 2008 presidential campaign websites are dedicated to doing as we quickly approach the season of debates and and never ending election commercials on TV.

The powerful Google boasts an astounding 64% of all searches done on the Internet as of March 2007(1). What does this mean for elections? It means that those who acknowledge the Internet’s importance and have the right internet marketing expertise working for them, can boost their campaign in a very big way.

Of course Google is not the only venue to increase ones voter base. Yahoo, MSN, and Ask.com claim 34% of the U.S. searches together(1). As you can see Google wins.

Mastering the art of internet marketing in each of the major search engines will certainly bring in more votes in this internet age. However, optimizing a website for all major search engines is nearly impossible. As most individuals discover this frustration they decide to focus their energy and time on the one that will bring the most fruit, Google.

Doing generic searches in Google for terms such as “2008 elections” brings up top ten results with mostly social-input, social-network type sites which also shows the power of such e-venues. Get more specific in your search such as typing in the exact name of the candidate of interest and you’ll probably get that candidates official website as the number one result(hopefully for them). Of course this has a lot to do with Google’s link popularity factor since official sites attract a lot of people wanting to link to official candidate sites.

So do you think the candidates care about how their sites rank in Google? Of course they do. They would be silly not to. From an internet marketing perspective what can we learn from this? Run for president and your site will soar in the Google rankings. No really, link popularity is still very very important. There are other important factors of course but getting other sites to link to you will always trump most of them. These official campaign sites get so much attention and PR that their backlinks are constantly growing. Most of us can’t create that kind of buzz but that shouldn’t stop us from trying. Get car and home insurance.

As Google has changed their algorithms it has become increasingly difficult to do anything but make a great site with great content and hope backlinks come naturally. Of course this doesn’t mean its time to freeze the SEO efforts. Look at it this way, these changes at Google are just weeding out the weak webmasters looking for quick and easy ways to rank well. They fall out easily while you’re still left working every day to create a valuable site that will gradually rise to its deserved position.

References:
1.http://www.hitwise.com/press-center/hitwiseHS2004/searchenginesmarch2007.php

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 19th, 2007 at 11:12 am and is filed under Loans and Other Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.