Sophisticated SEO can be very complicated and time consuming, but if you are a small political campaign and just don’t have the resources for a full-fledged web staff, there are some relatively simple things you will be able to do to boost your online presence. I will mention some of them briefly here, but I also recommend that you go through manual I found on the topic. This manual does a good job explaining the process of simple SEO.
1. The most basic thing you can do to make sure that you show up in search results is to make sure that the search engines know you even exist. Search engines use what are called web crawlers to find new content and index it. It can take a little bit of time for these crawlers to find you, so it is always smart to manually enter your new website into Google’s index using their Webmaster Tools. This basically just gets you on their radar. Also use Bing Webmaster tools. It will do the same thing, but allows you more control.
4. Link between pages within your own site. This will create a higher level of activity within the site that can increase visibility. Also make sure that you intentionally funnel as much traffic through your main website as possible from your social media networks and email lists. The more traffic a site gets, the more the search engines pay attention to it. Also, get other websites to link to your site.
5. Finally, you can use special search engines (such as Google AdWords) to find out what kind of keywords have been searched, and how often. For example you may find that no one searches for the term “Northern Virginia conservative”, but that “Northern Virginia Republican” is searched a lot. It behooves you then to use Republican more than conservative, so that you are considered relevant by searches. Doing this research will allow you to choose what keywords you want to make sure you capitalize on as you create your content.
These are just a few of the basic things required to have a high visibility website. Remember: if at first you don’t succeed, try something different and eventually you’ll hit on a formula that works for you.