Throughout the presidential campaign Barack Obama called for change, and only in office for one day it seems that some drastic change has already occurred – in the search engine optimization (SEO) of the White House’s website.
According to Dan Kashman at Searchviews, much of the website for the White House (whitehouse.gov) under the Bush administration was invisible to search engines because of robots.txt coding.
But the redesign of the site under the Obama administration has removed the coding, increasing its search engine optimization (SEO).
Kashman says that many businesses should take a page out of 44th president’s book when it comes to their own search engine optimization (SEO), and gives some presidential-style advice on keeping things flowing if a company is going through a website redesign.
Appointing a transition team is not just good advice for an incoming president, Kashman says, it’s important to have a team of experts available to spot and fix problems while going through a redesign.
He also says it’s important to set up your change of address. Although not many companies will be moving to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, it is important to make sure that old webpages that can be found in search engines redirect to new content.
These points should be important to most companies this year as a study last month from Junta42 found that more than half will increase their online marketing budgets in 2009.
