SEO for the 2008 Presidential Campaign?

A friend of mine posed a "what-if" conversational topic recently, about being tasked with optimizing the web site of a US presidential hopeful for the upcoming election. Though amusing to ponder how one might use SEO to crush or elevate such an important campaign on the web, it brought up a valid point - how ARE the presidential hopefuls doing with their online marketing, and more specifically, their natural search result rankings?

Here is a great article I came across, as I wondered just that: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whether-dnc-or-rnc-political-candidates-need-seo

My Online Marketing & SEO Resources

I exported all my SEO/ Online Marketing-related bookmarks from my laptop and published them online here:
http://zarasteadman.com/bookmarks.html

Check it out for a wealth of resources on content and technical SEO, viral marketing, online marketing, and other random things. I will be adding to this list in the future.

Who are the SEO experts?

I was recently asked what kind of certification I had in the field of SEO. This question piqued my curiosity into what kind of certification there could be for SEO... and a few minutes later I discovered a list of sites claiming to provide SEO certification.

But, to me, these sites just felt seedy and strange. I kept asking "who are these people?" wondering who had the authority to decide what were correct/ incorrect SEO strategies, and whether anyone cared about these certifications in the industry itself.

Then, I found this article on SEO Certification and it seemed to answer my question. Basically, I gleaned from the article that reliable SEO Certification is a myth - and that sites claiming to provide it have more chance of being a pyramid sales scheme than a genuine authority on SEO training.

How, then, can we prove we have SEO chops, if we in fact do? In the past I've always let search engine results pages speak for me... if a site you worked on is ranked in the top ten on SERPs - doesn't that prove your SEO expertise? Then again, I can see how maybe it wouldn't...

Corporations on Wikipedia

I was recently asked for advice for a company wanting to know if they should start a corporate Wikipedia profile and how that can be done. Here is my reply, I hope it's helpful to others as well:

I’d have to do more research to confirm this, but to my knowledge Wikipedia discourages corporations and individuals from creating their own Wikipedia pages unless they are “noteworthy” (i.e. worth talking about in an encyclopedia). You also have to be careful if you are going to edit any information on Wikipedia while on a corporation’s network because Wikipedia can track this and your corporation can get a bad reputation from it. (You can track changes made on Wikipedia by corporations here: http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr/)

To discourage link-building using Wikipedia, the site recently made all links on the site no-follow links, so they actually no longer contribute to Page Rank . That being said, you might still get a lot of traffic from a link on Wikipedia if you manage to get a link up there. A good way to try and do this is if you have educational information on your site somewhere that you can link to as a reference. For example, an air-filter site that has a lot of information on allergies might put a link to reference the info on their site at the bottom of the Wikipedia entry about allergies.

I would say, go ahead and try to create a Wikipedia page, because there’s no harm in trying – and if it gets left there, then it could drive traffic to your site. But chances are, Wikipedia is going to take the page down quickly and it will be difficult to keep your links up there.

I would try creating a corporate profile on places that would allow it, without the “no-follow” problem – like Facebook, MySpace, Squidoo, etc. and linking to the site in directories with high Page Rank, like Yahoo! Submit Basic.

Google's Evolving Search Algorithm

I ran across this interesting article on changes to the Google algorithm this morning: Google Changing the Way it Ranks Sites

It talks about how Google may start to place less importance on linkjuice and emphasize things like geographical relevance for determining page rank. The author says this makes sense in order to strengthen Google's search algorithm in today's changing web 2.0 community. Users have a bevvy of options for sharing sites they love including video and audio - methods that aren't necessarily confined to traditional text linking. The author indicates that major players in the evolving way links are shared are social networking portals like Facebook and MySpace: an area where most links are currently hardly recognized by Google's algorithm at all.

What does this mean for SEO? In the long run, it could mean less focus on gaining inbound links for your site, and more focus on relevant content and geographical popularity or relevance.

Personally, this makes sense. Tailoring search results to the specific needs and location of the user is bound to return more relevant results. That, and paid link directories are currently making way too much money from us poor SEO folks.