This is a "Rudiments of Online Campaiging" comment I just added to help explain what can be done in "lay" terms:
Link: http://www.mattwardman.com/blog/2009/01/26/mapping-political-website-success-in-google-a-new-technique-and-first-results/comment-page-1/#comment-12864 "The X axis is the position in a Google search, so low numbers are best. So - for example - the Wardman Wire graph shows that this blog appears high in the results when someone searches on "Schillings" (the legal firm) or "Tom Harris" (the ex transport minister). If there is no bar for a keyword, that means that it doesn't appear in the results on Google at all. Let me try and explain a different way. These are some of the things you can do. Say I wanted to campaign against Tom Harris, I could publish an article on the Wardman Wire and it would have a decent chance of it being seen by members of the public searching for "Tom Harris" using Google - as this site is seen as authoritative for searches on Tom's name. Those would be exactly the people I would want to read a critical article - as they are the group who are interested in the politician I am criticising. I do want to campaign against the way that Schillings the Lawyers operate, which is why it is useful to have an article appearing near the top of Google. Potential Schillings' clients may end up reading my critical article. Politically, achieving high Google results is also one way for us to reach the more general public who don't read specialist political sites or publications. And I think it is part of the answer to "indifference to politics". By looking at all the search results for names of all the members of all the Front Benches in Parliament, I can see how competitive a website is for a whole range of searches. And by comparing the same "profile" for different sites I can see who is more likely to get the visitors looking for (for example) Conservative Politicians. If you look at the Lib Dem Voice "profile graph" and compare it with that for "Conservative Home", you will see that Lib Dem Voice comes closer to the top of Google (i.e., has smaller bars) for searches on "Grant Shapps", "Eric Pickles" and "Chris Grayling". Conservative Home does not even reach the Top 100 for a search on "Chris Grayling". If I am Conservative, I can see that I need to do something to compete with the (presumably) critical articles on Lib Dem Voice. If I am Lib Dem, I can see that I am having a certain amount of success in getting the Lib Dem message across about Chris Grayling. I can combine that search ranking with a knowledge of how many people tend to click on the top 20 search results in Google to get an idea what the impact could be; I can also see from my log files how many people visit my site using a particular search term. I haven't published it, but I have a spreadsheet of what all the articles are that are top for each search term on each site - so I can easily see which articles are appearing at the top of Google searches on each site for each search keyword. If I wanted to, I could even go back and edit the articles appearing at the top of the Google results for my site to add links to more related articles on the same subject - one of the reasons I use "series of articles" so much on this site is to encourage Google visitors to explore more deeply. If I do a different graph, comparing the same search term across a whole range of websites, I can get some idea of the coverage about a politician or a party is getting across a section of the internet and which sites they are likely to be visiting. I hope that helps, and I'll do a more detailed analysis of the Lib Dem Voice graph tomorrow to help people get to grips with it." Matt
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