If anyone needed a better example of how much a black art search-engine optimization (SEO) has become, simply consider the Contra Costa Republican Party website.
If you select VIEW SOURCE, (link shows page as of 02-25-07) you can see the HTML that describes the page to your browser. If you view the META NAME KEYWORDS, you’ll see what I mean. Keyword tags help tell Google and other search engines and spiders what the page is all about and help rank that page higher or lower according to overall relevancy of the term(s) to the content of the page. People use Google then to find pages that contain terms for which they are searching. If your site is on the top page for that search, good chance someone will click through to your site.
So you can’t blame the Contra Costa GOP, or its webmaster, to think so highly of its very own Chairman, Tom Del Beccaro—recently elected as Vice-Chair of the California State Republican Party—to list “Del Becarro” in the keywords list. At first glance this might be considered by the cynical as hubris, but given that Contra Costa is such a blue county and Tom’s been so busy stumping it’s not entirely out of the question that there are actually more searches for “Del Beccaro” than “GOP”.
But “IRISH REPUBLICAN ARMY“? And in between “define gop” and “gop stand for” no less!
Attitude with a heavy brogue? I’m not sure that’s the kind of new recruit that Contra Costa Republicans need to click through to their web site.