Kikabink News

According to Adgooroo, U.S. Presidential candidate Barack Obama is more than five times more popular on the Internet than his rival, John McCain… if web traffic is anything to go by.

Adgooroo’s analysis reveals that more than five times the amount of traffic is being driven each month to websites relating to Barack Obama’s Presidential campaign. compared with those relating to John McCain’s campaign.

Meanwhile, the bulk of all this traffic is going to the main Obama and McCain websites. Nearly 93 percent of Obama-related web traffic is going directly to the Obama website, while 73 percent of McCain traffic is going to the main McCain website.

Interestingly, while there are 3.5 times more pro-Obama websites than pro-McCain websites on the Internet, McCain’s ‘grassroots supporter’ sites are receiving 11 percent more traffic than Obama’s grassroots sites.

Adgooroo’s evaluation of Obama’s and McCain’s respective search marketing efforts reveals that both campaigns are fairly equal in the level of sophistication of their paid search programs. The McCain campaign is apparently better at keyword selection, while the Obama campaign seems to be better at targeting topical keywords.

Obama’s campaign, meanwhile, is evidently winning in organic search. While McCain’s website ranks on the first page of Google search results for 67 keywords, Obama ranks on the first page for 117 keywords.

The big question is… what bearing does such Internet activity have on how the American public will vote?

Source: Adgooroo, “Searching for the Next President: the Internet’s impact on McCain vs. Obama”, Press Release

No one, except the search engine themselves, knows exactly what goes into the algorithms that determine where a website ranks in the organic search engine results pages (SERPs).

But there is a general consensus over the four (4) critical factors that affect your ranking. And it’s these factors that you really want to focus your attention on in order to improve your ranking:

1. Domain Age

In general, the older the domain, the higher a website will rank in the SERPs. This is for a number of reasons. One of which is the fact that Google’s patent specifies domain name age as being a factor in how it ranks websites, another being that older domain names (e.g. expired domain names) are likely to have more sites linking to them.

2. Content

The search engines tend to favor websites containing plenty of copy. According to Mark Jackson of Search Engine Watch, you want at least 150 words on a webpage, and this should include a decent smattering of your targeted keywords, which should ideally be within the first paragraph of text, and in your H1 tags.

3. Title Tags

Your webpage title tags should include the keywords targeted for that webpage.

4. Links

Domain age, content and title tags are all necessary… but not sufficient. Getting back links from authoritative and relevant websites is where the real search engine optimization game is at. The more quality back links your website has, the more highly it will rank in the SERPs.

Source: Mark Jackson, “Search Engine Optimization: Back To Basics”, Search Engine Watch, August 19, 2008

No Internet marketer – well, no Internet marketer with at least a passing interest in search engine marketing – should be without:

1. The Firefox web browser - whether Firefox 2.0 or 3.0 (the latest version); or

2. The free SEO tools and software available from Aaron Wall’s Seobook.com website. These are available as plugins for Firefox.

I’ll cover some of these tools in future issues of Kikabink News. For now, though, let me explain why Aaron’s RankChecker tool is a must-have.

To put it simply, if you want to know how your website ranks for one or more keywords… RankChecker will tell you. You basically type in your domain name, type in however many keywords you wish to check, click “Start” and RankChecker will tell you where you rank (if at all) in Google (US and international), Yahoo Search, and Microsoft Live. You can also export the results in CSV format (i.e. to save in your spreadsheet program).

Click here to download or learn more about RankChecker (yes, it works with Firefox 3.0).

If you haven’t already, click here to download Firefox 3.0 (I’ve heard a couple people say it’s buggy but it seems fine to me… and it certainly leaves its main competitor in the dust).