Cute political commentary from Reuters or maybe I shouldn’t have used the pic?
Hunter S. Thompson turned me onto American politics. That’s probably quite a dangerous thing, but true. I wouldn’t really describe myself as a junkie, but this particular election I’m watching with great interest seeming it’s my first from inside America and I’ll get to see it all unravel like a badly crocheted bra first hand.
Of course, only 24/7 rolling news could turn a load of pig farmers popping round to each other’s houses and firing the first election shot from the equivalent of a spud gun into a world-shattering event. Yes, I’m well aware there’s another eleven months of this to go.
Thursday managed to do one thing due to Barack Obama’s total trouncing of the field – and that was to ensure every other candidate would now present themselves as an ‘agent of change’. Change has become such a strong early meme that a mere mention of you changing your underpants daily is enough to raise you a couple of percentage points in the polls.
I think Sir Mitt of the Romney might be leading the change stakes with a current 74% CMQ (changes mentioned quotient). At the moment I’m doing quite a bit of SEO copy writing – that means I’m rewriting sites to help them rank better in search engines for specific search terms. While you’d never try and rank for such a broad meaningless term as ‘change’ – ‘agent of change’, perhaps – search engines would think you were some kind of keyword stuffing spammer if you tried to slip the word ‘change’ into the text of a Web page as often as some of these candidates are currently slipping it into debates.
Keyword placement and frequency is a science that search engines have factored into their algorithms. This then translates into near perfect percentages in relation to other on-page factors. Then again, nobody is party to these algorithms. Subsequently, you need a bit of experience to learn how to develop a certain feel for slipping keywords into pages without spamming or making the page in question appear unnatural for the benefit of the reader. I’ll refrain from claiming it’s therefore an art!
We had a great example this last week in fact. A client had their host remove something from the sidebar of their site that we’d rewritten and we noticed a significant drop in rankings for certain keywords. It didn’t take too much investigative work to find out that the home page had been replaced by the old version and that had caused the rankings drop. Thankfully, these types of things are easy to sort out. In this case we just had to upload the home page again. The rankings should return promptly.
It’s probably easier to identify elements within a Website that require changing than it is elements within the governmental process as there aren’t different ideologies competing in order to facilitate the change in question. However, if this story in yesterday’s London Times about the West effectively selling its own nuclear secrets to anybody who wanted them (including rogue terrorist states) is remotely near the mark, then the talk of democratic change won’t just be a meme but something imperative to prevent the masses marching on Capitol Hill with pitchforks in hand.
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This is the post that broke my reader only status. It drives me nuts to watch political speeches because they are beyond redundant. I am sure repeating the same word in every sentence has proven beneficial over time, or it wouldn’t be the norm. I believe the statistic is that we must be exposed to something 7 times before remembering it.
This practice frustrates me, but I’ve never considered it from a keyword saturation perspective. That’s exactly what they are doing. The parallel inspired me to comment.
However, my ultimate point comes from the various articles floating around that the 2008 Presidential candidates are not making the most of the Web as a campaigning medium. Relevant issues should be found by searchers.
So per the above inspiration I did a search for ‘agent of change’. The results were a bit disappointing for the post’s stated 74% saturation. The number 4 result consisted of news covering Romney’s latest campaigning and number 10 an article in which Bill Clinton refers to Hilary as an ‘agent of change.
Now, we all know that it takes time for natural results to be optimized for chosen keyword phrases but this doesn’t get the campaigners off the hook for the following reasons.
1. These campaigns have been in the works for quite some time now. Fund raising, budgeting, and planning have been somebody’s full-time job for a long enough period of time. Six months of SEO for ‘agent of change’ should have merited a result. A candidate should have an idea of such a desired perception at least this much in advance.
2. Even if ‘agent of change’ was a last minute adaptation to a campaign there is no reason why I am not seeing more political exposure on the results page. Pay Per Click allows immediate results. There are NO ads for this keyword phrase. Something is to be said not only for running a PPC campaign, but adapting it quickly to key trends. That is the beauty of this medium.
And that is the most you will ever get of me discussing politics.
Blimey. It was only ever meant as a slightly tongue-in-cheek figure – not a fully-blown cage rattler.
I must admit I hadn’t thought about the online implications of ‘agent of change’ as a keyword. But now I have, I think it’s an important point.
It shouldn’t really take six minutes to rank for ‘agent of change’ if your site has some form of authority and you get just a handful of your online campaigners to link through with ‘agent of change’ as the anchor text.
In fact, even without a bit of research I’d half expect this post to do alright.
But, I think targeting ‘agent of change’ via a PPC campaign is a killer idea to be honest.
Get Sarah to give Hillary a bell……then again….