Improving Your Cause or Campaign Website Ranking

If your campaign or cause has a website that isn't coming up near the top of listings for online searches, you could be missing connections to your voter base and potential online donations. Here are some basic tips from Online Candidate, a political website provider, on how to boost your search presence. Here's a no-brainer: Optimize your website with text that includes the candidate or cause name, your geographic target audience (such as state or municipality), and key topics or issues in the campaign or nonprofit appeal. Make sure that important search terms are used in your headlines and tags. Update frequently; search engines like fresh content. Focus on link building. Relevant, active in-bound links increase your search position. Some link suggestions: newspaper websites with relevant articles and online voter guides; other local candidates or causes; political party websites; supporter group websites; websites of groups campaigning for similar causes; and local or regional sites. Try to create links back to your site with varied link text, especially including names, locations and issues to boost your search relevance across more keywords; for example, go beyond links for "Smith for Mayor" to use "Smith for Happytown Mayor" and "Smith for Happytown Dog Park." For more, go to http://www.onlinecandidate.com/articles/getting-campaign-website-rank-search-engines