Brown2020

It’s the day before the biggest election in recent memory, and the Economy is the top issue as Americans have come to realize that the entire financial system at risk.

I typed the word “economy” into the search engine Google today, and saw that BarackObama.com is the third search result on the list out of 254,000,000 sites in the Google index. This is an amazing feat of Search Engine Optimization.

There are three fundamental ways to get attention on the Internet: pay for it, word of mouth, or through organic search results.

Paying for traffic by purchasing keywords from Google is expensive. It is so expensive to buy traffic that Google brought in a record $5.5 billion revenues for the three months ending September 30, 2008.

Word of mouth is the power of social networks like Facebook and Myspace. Information that we post travels through our newsfeed with lightning speed to our friends, even faster than we can email a YouTube video.

Organic search is perhaps the most important way of obtaining traffic. When we are seeking something, most of us start with a Google search. Traffic that comes in from a search result tends to be the most relevant. Rarely do we make it past the first page or two of Google results, however, before clicking on a search result or trying a new search term.

How does a website end up “above the fold” on the first Google result page out of 254,000,000 results? The exact Google algorithm is a well kept secret that Google keeps adjusting and updating, but the basic PageRank concept that Google patented 7 years ago still provides the underlying model. Google is looking for the center of attention, and their computers rank pages based on quantity and rank of the pages that are pointing to it.

Google PageRank Patent

Because lots of other sites copy content and use artificial means to get other sites to link to them, the algorithm needs to be updated constantly to do a better job of identifying original rather than copied content and to identify and discount and paid or artificial links. The way to be at the top of the list is to have quality original content useful enough to inspire lots of other quality sites to reference, plus Search Engine Optimization or SEO.

Winning SEO combines high quality, high utility content that is highly relevant to a keyword, together with coding that ensures the Google robots are able to find and prioritize the keyword you are optimizing, and intentional strategies to get high quality sites to link to your site with the intended keyword. This usually does not happen by accident. The appearance of BarackObama.com near the top the first page for a generic keyword like Economy can only be the result of very thoughtful and diligent SEO practice.

Fascinated by the ability of the Barack Obama campaign to land near the top of the list for the number one campaign issue, while JohnMcCain.com is nowhere to be found, I looked at other election issues, starting with the CNN issue list below and then adding some variations.

CNN Election Issues 2008

Here are the results. I marked each CNN issue with a plus sign in the left column. The number of searches is for the month of October 2008, as determined by the Google keyword tool made available to advertisers would like to know which keywords to purchase and how many results to expect. The Index Pages indicates just how many web pages Google has in its database competing for the given keyword.

After you do a search, Google generally shows 10 results per page, plus a sprinkling of results from other Google services like news, books, blogs and videos. I only counted actual search results, not Google promoted links. When I searched for the issue term, I looked up to four or five pages deep, and I noted the page that either BarackObama.com or JohnMcCain.com came up in the list, along with the actual placement rank.

Not just for “economy” but for many of the top issues, BarackObama.com appeared on the first or second pages, including first page results for the hottest issues as measured by actual search queries: healthcare, energy, and immigration. JohnMcCain.com was also on the first page for healthcare, and made page one for climate change and national security, but in general the John McCain website had far fewer search results for far fewer issues than Barack Obama.