A post on the ever excellent SEOmoz about how well candidates for the 2008 US Presidential elections are making use of SEO got me wondering whether the politicians involved in the iminent campaign to elect a new Labour leader and deputy leader were doing any better.

When searching for the names of the three likely candidates for the position of Labour leader, the first position in each case is taken by an official website of some sort, which is a good start. However, only John McDonnell has managed to get his official campaign site to the top of Google – searches for Gordon Brown or Michael Meacher return sites which I assume can not be used for anything as grubby as campaigning.

In the top position for Gordon Brown is his page on the official treasury site and a search for Michael Meacher shows his section on ePolitix; his campaign page ranks at #4, meaning he’s losing out on anything up to 60% of potential traffic from searches for his name. Whilst Mr Brown only actually launched his campaign last week, it might have been wise to have a holding page ready to go live the moment it became official.

And what about the multitude of candidates for the deputy leadership? Hazel Blears has a campaign page which appears at #3 in Google’s results for a search on her name, whilst the top slot is taken by an official site which, when you click through to it, points you to another site, which (at the time of writing this) appears to be completely empty. I would suggest that Hazel’s team read up about 301 redirects and the potential damage of directing traffic to empty pages.

Peter Hain, Harriet Harman, Alan Johnson & Jon Cruddas have all set up campaign sites which rank in the top position for relevant searches but the teams responsible for the sites of Mr Hain & Mr Johnson could probably learn a thing or two about the importance of description tags from the people behind the sites for Harman & Cruddas.

Of course all of this is only relevant for searches for the actual names of the candidates in which case it seems like the papers are right and that Gordon Brown is set to sweep to victory. The place that these people should really be aiming to get to #1 is on searches for the issues (the leadership campaign), as opposed to the brands (the candidates). And if that were the real measure of success, then a search for Labour leadership campaign suggests a result that no-one is predicting. But then we’ve never said that Google can predict the future!

Header image: jem on Flickr

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