By Randy Brown of Web-Magic, Georgia’s SEO Pro

 

And by Greg Hoffman, Marketing Gorilla

 

Site Analysis of Karen Handel for Governor of Georgia

 

First Impression:

Your designers did a great job with the colors, the action of the images, the style and the content inside the site. But the flash landing page is a major problem for the search engines and user friendliness.

 

Key Problems:

1. No way to turn off the music (problem for many users and an instant way to lose the visitor)
2. Flash content on the landing page (problem for search engine spiders)
3. Site does not auto load after landing page flash runs (problem for many users who may ignore the skip intro link and leave immediately)
4. Less than sufficient reciprocal links.

 

Meta Tags

There are several ways that using Meta Tags in your web pages will help increase the traffic to your site. First, they allow you to tell the search engines and web spiders exactly how to describe your site. Second, including keywords in your Meta Tag tells the search engine that when a person types in a certain word (like the word “ gif “ ) to search for, (at a site like Alta Vista) your site is one to be uploaded. Third, using Meta Tags allows you to get your site listed closer to the top of a search list (there are, of course, other factors including popularity and keyword to content density).

 
Not every web spider will read your Meta Tags but the majority will. It is enough to know that 18 out of the 20 largest search engines do read Meta Tags if for no other reason than for the description tag.

 

Current Meta Descriptions Tag:

Problems: You are allowed 100-200 characters in the description tag depending on the search engine. The description tag is what the engines use as your brief description in a results page to help a surfer choose the link they want to click. It will help you significantly if you write more into this tag.

 

Current Meta Keywords Tag:  

Problems: You are allowed 1000 characters in the keyword tag and you’re not using enough termes and phrases. The keyword tag is one of many items that search engines use to find you in a search. The user types keywords and based on the words on your site, in your tags and your links from other sites, you are placed in the results list. There are many other terms you could be using on this tag up to 1000 characters. We might also recommend using misspellings here. Undoubtedly, some surfers may not know the correct spelling of Handel, and will most assuredly search for “Karen Handle”.

 

Reciprocal Links

Links from Vendors/Partners/Associations are 431. That’s not terrible, but it is extremely important that you continue to improve on this – these days, this is mandatory particularly on Google. It will increase your search rankings and targeted traffic. We endeavor to get a minimum of 1000, but most of our customers are higher than that.

 

Some search engines calculate the number of links to your site from other sites and use it to determine your ranking. As you know, a better position equals more targeted traffic! Another way reciprocal links can benefit you is by drawing repeat traffic back to your website. If you offer a high- quality list of relevant links, visitors will return often because they know that they can quickly find what they’re looking for.

 

Simple Site Mechanical Analysis

Clean site, good content, but written in flash which is a problem for many of the search engines. We love flash, dont’ get us wrong, but it needs to be used in conjunction with smart SEO tactics.  Use of a landing page is not a recommended practice. Use of music with no way to turn it off is likewise not recommended.

 

The more targeted traffic you attract, the more potential voters you’ll attract and meta-information is extremely important to that end. This site needs a real effort put into search engine placement. Remember, on the web it’s “If you build it, WILL THEY COME?” If we don’t successfully tell them where it is, not much chance of getting targeted visitors. Do not rely on earned or paid media alone. With some solid SEO effort you will find organic traffic online. 

 

Also, you need to develop and submit Press Releases to online distribution services and utilize political blogs. This is the fastest, most effective way of improving search engine position for a site of this nature. Anchor links for relative keywords will get you the grassroots traffic you need through the search engines.

 

Start typing in keywords in search engines and ask your team why your site doesn’t rank in the top five results!

 

Next up, we look at Ray McBerry’s campaign site.