Search Engines and The Election
Search engine optimization is a method that many websites use to make sure that their site shows up higher on Google (and other search engines) for various keywords. In many ways, search engine optimization is an easy way to improve a site’s authority score as was discussed in class with respect to Google’s page rank algorithm. The site seovote.com shows many statistics about the web and social media impact of both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.
This site has many interesting charts and numbers. Barack Obama has significantly more followers on Twitter and likes on Facebook, but he has less actual searches in the recent months. Despite Obama having fewer searches, he has significantly more web traffic on his site: 8.7 million to 2.6 million. This highlights the fact that Obama’s official website is better optimized to return as a prominent result for more searches. Obama’s site also has more linking domains, which would help increase its chances of resulting in a higher search listing. It is safe to say that Obama’s site has a higher authority score. This site also includes data on other information like the number of unique visitors to their respective sites, as well as the monetary value of the web traffic and how much was spent on Google adwords.
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