It's the third of January and those of us in the United States are already pretty tired of hearing about November's Presidential Election. I'm sure the rest of you are, too. The world of social media is already flooded with stories about the U.S.'s political dramas and I can only imagine that if you're in any other country, today's offerings at Reddit might not interest you all that much. Currently, seven of the top 10 Reddit stories focus on the U.S. elections. But this really isn't my point.

We're tired of it already and it won't be truly over for another year and two weeks. Yes, it's a Wikipedia link, but it's nofollowed. Do you know how hard it is to find an impartial result for searches like "2009 inauguration day?" Hopefully, a year is enough time for politicians across America to get their web campaigns together. No, I am not going to rehash Herndon Hasty's Search Engine Watch post, SEO for President. Herndon does a great job highlighting how these national campaigns, armed with more money and resources than God, have implemented absolutely no SEO and only rank well due to a large number of inbound links. However, the presidential race is not the only thing Americans will vote on this year: thousands of positions are up for grabs all over the country and thousands of people are campaigning to fill them.

Over the Christmas break, I took a look at the online campaigns of candidates in a Washington State race. The seat itself is a local one which won't attract any publicity outside of a certain Washington town. However, the race for this seat has been fantastically tight during the last two elections (2000 and 2004). Candidates spent a lot of time, money and effort on their campaigns, as I'm sure similar people in similar positions did all across the U.S. However, right as Election Fever hits America, only one candidate appears to have started an online campaign. The candidate has a surprisingly good Facebook fan page, a Myspace account and a YouTube channel. While this candidate's old website, which still ranks first for his name, is the most atrocious thing I've ever laid eyes on, his new campaign has some social media know-how behind it. It's not all that fantastic, but his competitors stand to lose a lot in the coming months if they don't step it up. I'm not linking to these Washington candidates' properties for personal reasons. Don't get excited; my reasons are far from interesting.

The most striking thing about this person's campaign is that this candidate didn't even make it past the primaries in 2004. For anyone who's unsure what that means, candidates from the same party compete against each other in order to obtain their party's nomination. Once they have taken care of everyone from their own party, they get to compete against candidates from other parties. This person lost to a fellow party member. Four years later, he has not only cleaned up his image, but he's attempting to usurp his competitors online.

This said, the SEO behind this candidate - both in terms of on-page optimisation and overall strategy - is still pretty poor. Presumably, he owns http://www.hisname.com/ (which ranks first for his name and eighth for "(position) (area)"), and yet his website for the 2008 campaign is http://www.votehisname.com/. This new website ranks twentieth for the "(position) (area)" query, which is still about one-hundred positions higher than his competitors, but could be a lot better.

The site is badly optimised, with no H1 or H2 tags, no meta description and images used in place of text (with questionable alternative text). It has a title tag, which is a giant victory over all of his competitors. I am seriously considering revising the title of this post, because these political websites aren't four years behind the times: they would have been unacceptable in 2000, let alone 2004. In the Search Engine Watch article, Herndon Hasty says, "Holes this big would sink normal sites and create e-commerce job openings by the dozens," and he is correct. The astounding thing about this is that these holes and mistakes are easy to fix.  For local races such as this one, the competition for rankings is remarkably minimal. Often, the candidates aren't even competing against .gov sites!

Imagine ranking highly for queries such as "(area) (pressing local issue)." At best, the general public still only has a fleeting understanding of how search engines work; immediately, the candidate will earn a certain amount of trust and credibility when his or her site appears for searches like these, even if that trust isn't deserved. Another thing to keep in mind is that visibility is half the battle in smaller political races: unless people have decided to vote "down party lines", they will often simply vote for the person whose name they have seen in more television commercials, billboards and newspaper articles. Something about being visible seems to translate into being reputable, hence the reason why the person who raises the most money often wins the race.

Controlling relevant SERPs is also an exercise in reputation management if you are running for office. Local politics can be as mean and nasty as it is on the national scene: This year, I am quite certain that people will head to search engines to research political rumours. Again, it won't take much social media or SEO work to push a controlled message to the top of the search engines, but few are currently taking advantage of the easy public relations opportunity.

The awful job politicians are doing online this year surprises me. The Internet plays a far bigger role in our day-to-day lives than it did in 2004, even though most of us were quite well-attached to our computers back then. Politicians should realise the importance of search engines, social media and Internet marketing. While I wouldn't expect people outside of the technology world to inherently know these things, I would at least expect them to do a bit of research. With the amount of money these people spend on their campaigns, it would be a shame to lose based upon easily fixed SEO problems.

UPDATE from Scott:  Due to the subject of this post, I thought some of you may be interested to see how the campaign searchscape has changed since I posted about political campaign SEO back in May.  Below you'll find the chart comparing candidates' search presence from May '07 and a new updated version as of Jan 3, '08 (Iowa Caucus Day).  I've substituted Democratic candidate, Mike Gravel (who has all but vanished), with upstart Republican candidate, Mike Huckabee, to try and keep things relevant.

Candidate Search Comparison May '07:



Candidate Search Comparison January '08:



As you can see, there's been a bit of shuffling. People with semi-functional eyes will notice the huge surge in Ron Paul's Alexa Traffic Rank. For more on what the hell that's all about, you can check out my article on the Ron Paul Effect.