Erik Qualman has written an interesting article in Search Engine Watch. He has compared the Internet activities of each of the United States’ presidential candidates, Senator Barack Obama and Senator John McCain, focusing on five key areas. He deems Obama as the overall online winner:

1. Website traffic (Obama is the winner): Obama’s site receives 5.5 million unique visitors, while John McCain’s site receives 3.1 million (based on Compete data).

2. Social media (Obama): Obama has over 2 million fans on Facebook, while McCain has just under 600,000.

3. Paid search (McCain): McCain has higher listings than Obama on key search terms.

4. Organic search (tie): while, for every one search for ‘McCain’ there are 2.2 searches for ‘Obama’… there are even more searches for ‘Palin’ (Republican vice-presidential candidate, Governor Sarah Palin) than Obama. In fact, there are more searches for McCain and Palin combined, compared with Obama and Biden (Democratic vice-presidential candidate, Senator Joe Biden) combined.

5. YouTube (Obama): Obama’s YouTube channel has 100,000 subscribers and his videos have been viewed 17.1 million times. John McCain’s YouTube channel has 24,000 subscribers and has been viewed just 11.1 million times.

How any of this translates into actual votes remains to be seen… but not too long to go now!

Source: Erik Qualman, “Obama is Winning the Internet War”, Search Engine Watch, October 16, 2008

The United States Department of Justice has indicted David Kernell, the son of a Tennessee state representative, alleging he hacked into vice-presidential-candidate Governor Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email account.

The indictment alleges that Kernell gained access to Palin’s Yahoo email account, changed the password, took screenshots of the account contents, and posted the password and images on the Internet.

The indictment potentially carries a $250,000 fine and up to five years imprisonment.

Source: Rick Turoczy, “Campaigning with Technology: Palin’s Email Hack Remains One of the Few Negatives”, ReadWriteWeb, October 8, 2008

It can be highly tempting to rely SOLELY on keyword research tools. Both to indicate what keywords your target market is using to find your kinds of products and services, and what keywords to target for search engine optimization.

After all, the good tools reflect what people are actually searching on… not anyone’s opinion or theory of what they’re searching on.

But are they the be-all and end-all?

Then answer is NO.

There are two main problems with the data generated by even the best keyword tools:

1. It’s retrospective - it tells us what people have searched on in the past, not necessarily what they will search on in the future. Now, depending on your market, people may not use significantly different keywords going forward. On the other hand, you could miss out on huge opportunities to capitalize on the most topical issues and developments by focusing entirely on past search queries. For example, it took one announcement for searches on words related to Governor Sarah Palin to skyrocket in the search engines.
2. A lot of your competitors are not only looking at the same data but may also be typing in those keywords, thereby distorting how often your target market really is using various search phrases. Again, this may not be significant… but if you’re in a hyper-competitive market it may be significant enough for you to make erroneous decisions about which keywords to target.

By all means use a quality keyword research tool (some good ones are listed below). But I also recommend keeping abreast of what’s happening in your industry and the media for news that may impact on what people search on… and what keywords YOU target for search engine marketing purposes.

Tools I like:

• Wordtracker: http://www.wordtracker.com
• Keyword Discovery: http://www.keyworddiscovery.com
• Google AdWords Keyword Tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal