In these modern times there are few things as important to political candidates as getting people to their websites. The (re)-election website is the hub for the candidate’s views, donations, campaign stops and email list subscription. Let’s look at the search results and HTML tuning that each site has.
First up is Mitt Romney. When searching for just his name there are three ads, some news results that might not always be positive and then finally his actual site. To be clear the official site for Romney is http://www.mittromney.com/.
The first ad is to his site’s donation page and that certainly sends its own message. The second ad is for site that supports Romney but is unaffiliated and the third site is Obama’s. Google then decides to toss in some news before the organic result for Romney’s site.
Looking at the actual code on Romney’s site it’s clear that his team has not done much work with meta tags to help Google decide which search results to send his way.
Click to enlarge.The extent of the effort is a meta title tag of “Mitt Romney for President | Mitt Romney for President of the United States of America in 2012” and noting that the page type is “politician.” His team could do a lot better.
Looking at Obama’s search results for just his name returns one ad leading people to his site followed by an organic result for his site.
When you look at Obama’s HTML it’s easy to see why his organic result is better and it even has a little Easter egg.
Click to enlarge.They have complete and descriptive metadata for the site and for various social networks. Right away it’s easy to tell that someone took the time to work on the details.
It’s well knows that to connect with computer savvy people ASCII art is the most direct method.
