Here in the States it’s election season. I recently had a conversation with a campaign worker that said there is “no way” to SEO for a political election. Well my friends, we’re going to spend our day putting together a SEO strategy guide for those with political dreams.
I am going to cover the three most influential search optimization strategies out there for political SEO. The only thing I ask, if you have an idea for something to add – post a comment!
Rel=Author
Your job as an SEO is two-fold. One, you are responsible to make google aware of your site and to make the site rank as good as you can. You also want users to click on your site from the other 9 results that are given to compete with your site. One way that has been pretty successful is rel=author. For those not in the know, it really puts your site above all the other sites on the serp by showing your picture next to your result, like so:
Setting up rel=author is fairly easy, especially if you follow a simple guide like yoast’s. and you can see a significant increase in traffic – AJ saw a 40% increase!
Leverage your blog as a news source
This one is more difficult, but it can be used. If you want to represent constituents in some form or another, you have to show that you care about the issues that affect your supporters. To do this write about these issues every day. Comment on the news and share your opinion with your target audience – the voters. You can submit your to GoogleNews here: http://support.google.com/news/publisher/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=40787. In doing this, you should probably already have rel=author set up, but you don’t need it. All that is required is that you have seperate author pages for each author writing for your blog. As a political candidate, it should probably just be you writing…or at least just have your name atttached to it.
Cross collateralize
Optimize for your competition! This is probably the most controversial thing I will recommend. Unless you are Barack Obama or extremely lucky you will be running against a variety of people. Why not optimize for them? Think of your site having a “about the race” type of section. In that, you dedicate a page to each of the people you are running against. Now on each page, provide some information about your opposition, then compare yourself and the other candidate based on the issues. That way when someone learns about your race, they learn about it through a direct portal to your views, they may be there to read about your competiton, but they are on your site and you can write to convince them at that point.
These are the top three things I would recommend for those running for office. Can you think of more things? Let me know in the comment and YOU may get your idea added to the article!
