Long Tail Politics
Vermont GOP.com has nothing to do with the official Republican Party web site for Vermont. This is a domain I registered to see what kinds of creative ideas might be used on a politically related web site.
For the 2004 political campaign season I tried using this site as a place where I offered a free evaluation of any politician's web site. There was almost no interest in this service, so I have been looking around for something more interesting. I think I may have found it in the Long Tail of Search discussions currently popular at some websites.
The long tail of search refers to the process where searchers using the big search engines begin to refine their searches in an effort to make the results more relevant to what they are doing. For example, the first time you do a search you might look for the term Republican. Unless you really want to find the website for the Republican National Committee or sites like that, it's not an effective term. In fact, one of the results when I did that search was a place selling Republican tee shirts :). Probably not really useful. Internet users are learning that more specific searches are more likely to reward them will more relevant results.
These more restrictive and limited searches form the long tail. How does that apply to the Vermont GOP and politics in general? This site is a perfect example. It turns out that four or five people per day actually search for "Vermont GOP" and this site comes up near the top. If you run the search yourself you will also notice there are no sponsored ads on the right side of the page. A clever Democrat or special interest group could buy advertising space there very cheaply. Their message would get displayed there every time someone ran that particular search.
With some keyword research it would no doubt be possible to find many other terms for which there are a few searches every day. The total numbers will begin to add up; so that a very cheap campaign would begin to be noticed.
It will also be interesting to see what level of technical sophistication will be exhibited by state candidate websites. I think the penetration of current thinking about how to optimize (SEO) political websites for increased organic search traffic will lag well behind the state of the art. Effective search engine optimization takes time, it may take months for a new website to escape the Google Sandbox. It's not like broadcast or radio advertising where the bulk of election funds get spent in the last few days of a campaign.
I think the long tail ideas will come into play at the national level too, and plan to write about them at www.USgop.com
The image at the top of this page is pretty (in my humble opinion) but it obviously wasn't taken in Vermont. I hope to visit there in a couple of weeks and take a better one.