in honor of the presidential debate being at my alma mater* tonight, i thought i’d weigh in on the candidates in the only way i know how. a super geeky way. this is my five minute audit of how search friendly each candidates’ site is.

*for the record, not a bit of the education required to write this blog post came from BU.

	Obama	McCain
Homepage Title	Barack Obama and Joe Biden: The Change We Need	JohnMcCain.com - McCain-Palin 2008
keywords	president, senator, illinois, chicago, barack, barck, barek, obama, 2008, 08, presidential, president, campaign, election	John McCain, McCain, mccain for president, John S. McCain, McCain 2008, president, presidential, 2008, campaign, election, straight talk, straight talk express, politics, political, john mccain, john mccain for president, senator john mccain, sen. john mccain, cindy mccain, john mcain, john mckaine, john maccane, jon mccain, john maccaine, john mccaine, mccain 2008, johnmccain.com, senator mccain, mccain 2000, mccain campaign, mccain hq, exploremccain.com, explore mccain, mccain exploratory committee, mccain exploratory
Meta Description	Official Website of Barack Obama 2008 Presidential Campaign	John McCain 2008 - The Official Website of John McCain’s 2008 Campaign for President
Detailed Listing	Yes	No
Paid Ads	Yes	Yes
Inlinks	10,400	8,820
clean code	mostly	not so much
Analytics	Google	HBX/WebSideStory
Page Rank	8	8

homepage title: this is important. the page title is weighted heavily and is what shows up on the search engine results page (serp) when someone performs a query. i think this one is a tie. obama does a good job of encouraging user click through (”the change we need”) but no one is searching for those terms so its a bit of a catch 22. mccain gets straight to the point. its simple, but is a little short for my tastes, so there’s a bit of wasted space. and neither use my favorite page title divider, the | pipe.

meta keywords: not a highly weighted feature, but is a good spot for misspellings. should be no more than 7-12 keywords per page. obama wins. mccain’s keywords make it look like he’s trying to rank on lycos circa 1998.

meta description: this also shows up on the serp when someone performs a query so has to be written with both search engines and users in mind. they are both decent. a tie.

detailed serp listing: based on a variety of factors, your site may get fancy pants results when googled. barack wins, very nice:

paid ads: they’ve both got ‘em. mccain is using a vanity url (mccainpalinvictory2008.com) and i don’t like it one bit. i mean, is that an official site? i think its confusing. obama is directing people to barackobama.com - good move. obama’s ads are showing up in the spot where ads that perform well show up, mccain’s are consistently not, which is a red flag, since i’m searching for “john mccain”. how are those ads not performing well? i blame the vanity url.

and finally, it looks like obama is definitely experimenting with different ad copy and possibly dynamic keyword insertion. mccain - not so much. give me a call, buddy, i’ll hook you up. oh yeah, sources indicate mccain is outspending obama on paid search ads by as much as 5x.

inlinks: incoming links are important. they tell search engines that other people (besides you) think your site is important. this is a close one, but obama squeaks by with about 2k more.

clean code: search engines like clean code, and the easier it is for them to find the real content of the page, the better. mccain needs to use some off page style sheets and javascript. the code looks yucky and is diluting the content on the page. obama is better in this department but still has an on page style sheet that could be removed and sourced from somewhere else.

analytics: i like google analytics and hbx. however, if i had donated my money to either campaign, they damn well better be using google. but it does look like mccain is using custom variables and some other more advanced filtering features, so at least they aren’t paying for it and not fully utilizing it.

page rank: its not that important really, but they both get an 8. tie game.

other: when you sign up for an account at obama’s website, its called “MyBO”. really? really, people? my BO? negative points awarded.

for the record, obama gets more searches, in general: stats

overall, obama wins.