Are you making the most of what is written about you or your political opponent? During a political campaign, there will be news coverage of the candidates. How you handle that coverage can help both your website visitors and your campaign’s search engine optimization.
Here are a few simple tips to promote online news stories and help build your online reputation at the same time.
Don’t just link to headlines when adding news items to your website. And whatever you do, don’t reproduce full article text without permission from the publisher. That’s plagiarism. And it can come back to bite you. Instead, summarize the article in a short paragraph or work it into other content. You can even editorialize to make it flow better or make a specific point.
“… the turnout at our fundraising event was a great success, even better than our first.”
We see a lot of our clients just copy and paste entire articles into blog posts. This is one of biggest mistakes they can make. Also, they may copy an article’s photo without permission or attribution.
Don’t just link to material that talks about you. Link to articles or editorials that are critical of your opponent. You can use them to reinforce your own positions.
“… as you can see from this article, [opponent] is still having problems with …”
In this case, linking out to third-party articles serves two purposes. First, it provides a point of reference that lets you back up your statements. Second, it allows you to promote positive information about for your campaign and promotes material that is not so good for your opponent. (After all, why would you promote positive things about your opponent? That’s their job.)
Tip: Don’t go crazy with too many links on your pages. This can overwhelm users and actually make it harder for them to find the information they need.
Not only should you link to articles from your campaign’s website, but you should also share those links on your social media accounts. Encourage your supporters to do the same.
The number of a web page has influences how likely that page will rank in related search results. Ideally, when a voter does a search for your name, not only will your campaign website come up, but also favorable articles that you have promoted should appear.
Conversely, by linking to and sharing content critical of your opponent, you can help that material show up when someone searches for your opponent. With a little work, this tactic can be very effective, especially with local campaigns that don’t have a large amount of online coverage.
For larger campaigns with more online material and coverage, it may be more difficult to push up or push down specific content. For those cases, you may want to reach out to online reputation specialists.
For more advanced online tactics and strategies, visit OnlineCandidateResources.com. Site access is included with any of our Online Candidate website packages.
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