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Political SEO is a resource few SEO companies manage to tap, as it’s a highly specialized activity. In this post I plan to shed a little light on this subject, untouched for some reason by most SEO’s. There are a few particularities unique to this kind of SEO, as there are multiple factors to be considered. I won’t give away all our trade secrets, just setting the base for a broader article - hopefully soon to follow.

First of all, the first problem refers to the type of client. The usual customer would be a candidate. Sometimes, the client can be a political party. The candidate customer would be the most difficult one, as there are two diverging considerations: the time factor and the image factor.

The time factor: it’s obvious, election day is D day. So by that time, your client should dominate the Web with his message. The plot thickens when you need to take into account the law in various countries, and the moment your candidate decides to get into the race. While in most countries the timeframe is of about 3 months, there may be cases when you only have one month from decision to D day. Time for miracles :). The less admitted fact of political SEO is that most of the time operatives must be literate in black hat SEO, because it’s a battle with well known competitors. You need to know very well both the attack and the defense.

The image factor: obviously your customer has an image to maintain in the public’s eye. Engaging in obvious Black Hat tactics, while giving fast results, can always backfire ahead of time, or will discredit him in the long term, as your promoting sites become invisible for Search Engines. There are solutions to this - but you need to be aware of the dangers!

The most used techniques include the all classics: link-wheels, social marketing, press releases, articles. Google Bombs are usually present in the picture, so a plan to defend yourself from them would help a lot. Geo-targeting is a must, as most customers only want to reach electors from a given area, saving resources for the offline campaign, but such a headache for the online one. All bets are off, so PPC will have to play a vital role in this also.

This will be revisited, we promise!

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SEO and privacy

I’ve been struggling for some time now with this issue, since privacy is such a delicate subject these days in the online world. There’s a lot of contradiction at the moment, sides are being taken, boundaries are drawn and crossed every day. But what does it all mean, and how does it affect SEO?

The privacy issue now has the world split in two. Those who are willing to give up their privacy “for the common good” and those who believe that private information should stay that way. And of course a lot of people in between. Up until some time ago, online privacy was something that you could choose to observe. Most websites would ask you before collecting information about you, or those that would simply do it were branded as felons - and most had a bad ending, and rightly so. While staying anonymous online was not easy, it was at least in some way controllable.

It all ended with the emergence of social networking – Facebook, Myspace, etc. People started signing up like crazy in these roller coasters of information, sharing pictures, addresses, birthdays and interests with anyone interested. US Government constant pushing for lowering the privacy boundaries of it’s citizens didn’t help, people considering normal to share all kind of info. Google leaped at the chance, and started to provide personalized services, personalized SERP’s and in the end, joined the entire web industry, in providing personalized adverts.

The end of the year saw the push of Google’s latest child – the opt-out personalization. It is a huge gamble for Google, as it breaks a lot of privacy laws in the EU and not only. It was the first moment Google saw a noticeable drop in market share, as this little advertised move was being criticized violently by webmasters all around the world => Bing started growing. The main issue with this opt-out personalization is the fact that Google will collect information about users regardless of them being logged in their Google accounts, and providing personalized SERP’s, as well as advertisement, based on the collected data. Trouble is, there’s no apparent way to get out of this – the process is not accessible to neophytes, and collects info regardless of the participant’s age – illegal in EU without express parental agreement.

Combined with the blatant security issues Facebook admits having, and the deliberate sharing of information with any of it’s partners, things started looking grim for privacy in the online world.

From a SEO standpoint, things are changed dramatically. Personalized SERP’s mean that rankings are not constant form user to user, and more direct access to user preferences will make the difference. Social networking just became more important, and the battle for CTR will make the difference. The first page results will be all scrambled, with sites competing not only for a better position, but also for a better description, to get users in.

There’s another issue though: a recent movement started rejecting these privacy invading actions. Facebook starts loosing active users for the first time since launch, Google is constantly loosing market share.

In my view, the battle for user’s privacy is just shaping up. Companies will continue to try to get a hold on as much info as they can, and for a while people might let them. Until they lose a job over something they’ve written years ago on their facebook account. Or until they lose business deal over something they posted on a blog …

Privacy will continue to be a delicate subject in the online world, and in our view keeping the private information private will be a good thing for SEO as well. Targeted advertisement, and targeted SERP’s will only provide the results people wanted or found interesting at one time in their lives. They need change, they need fresh results, they need new products and good offers on the services they use.

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Geo-targeted search

Google is going local.

Since the first tests in 2003, the geo-targeted search was the source of many myths and frustration fo countless webmasters, but also the key to success for the smart ones. As with most Google products, the localized search is annoyingly complicated in it's simplicity.

Most companies are not equipped to function globally. Most of the time, beside targeting a specialized niche, they target a specific geographic area, where they can activate. Whether it's a country, continent, or city block, there's little point in aiming for the ocean when all you need is to become the big fish in your pond. Geo-targeted SEO will help you do just that, optimize your site and link-building to achieve this result!

A few simple tricks:

- Try to add a phone number to your website - it will help Google determine your location very fast.

- Aim for longtails, the more specific the better. Statistics say that almost 70% of product and companies searches use some kind of geo-targeted keyword.

- Brand yourself as the area company - "Chelsea used cars" for instance, both in title and description.

- Use Google Maps to record your location.

- Try to obtain links from your geographic area.

- If you're just starting up, a geo-targeted domain would be nice ;)

- Use Google's Webmaster Tools to set your target area.

And remember: following in Google's footsteps all the social networks and starting to think local as well... This is not the last work, a lot of relevance will develop out of geo-targeting on multiple fronts!

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