By Randy Brown, Web-Magic.biz and Greg Hoffman, Marketing Gorilla

 

First Impression:

Simple and to the point. Good info, low on effects.

 

Key Problems:

In our opinion, GeorgiaFirst.com is less aesthetically pleasing as some of the others but if the governor’s race was next week and the Internet was the only way to judge candidates, Ray McBerry would win hands down. We do, however, have some constructive tips below that will make the site the darling of the search engines in this race long-term. 

 
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 Title Tag: Candidate not mentioned in the title.

 

Current Meta Descriptions Tag: 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: You are allowed 1000 characters in the keyword tag and you’re not using enough terms 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.

 

Links:

Links from Vendors/Partners/Associations are 1,421. That’s extremely good, particularly this early in the campaign. Keep it up!
Reciprocal linking is a way for website owners to share each other’s traffic. Do not rely on earned or paid media links alone. Find relevant sites that will link to you with keywords other than your name because search engines place a high value on such links. 

 

Simple Site Mechanical Analysis:

Clean site, good content, intro voice-over might be a bit distracting, but it is very short. No landing page allows potential voters to get right to the message. This candidate site is near the top of all the relevant key phrase searches. Very good job.

 

The more targeted traffic you attract, the more potential voters you’ll attract before they find your competitor’s site and meta-information is extremely important to that end.