It has long be a practice in political marketing to understand as much as you can about your target audience, but doing so in the web has not been easy, until now. The Washington Post has reported that Candidates are using their web sites to get to know users. So, how does this work?

Once a viewer visits a candidate’s web site, a cookie (a mechanism that allows a web server to recognize you) is placed on your browser. Once you leave the site, political campaigns are able to track you. That’s right, they are able to see what articles you read, what your favorite blogs are, a history of sites you have visited, and much more. Once political campaigns get to know more about who you, are, they are better able to target you with ads.

Targeting and how it works

Targeting you based on your internet habits is a practice called “behavioral targeting”. Here is how it works:

• You visit a Candidate’s web site in order to find out more about them and then, you leave. The web site places a cookie on your browser.
• A week later you visit a website on healthcare and down in the bottom left corner you notice a web ad for your candidate’s health plan. You have just been targeted based on your habits.

So, what can you do? If you do not like being spied on, you can simply ignore cookies by changing the settings of your internet options.

From your Start Menu, simple click on “Control Panel” choose “Internet Options” choose the tab “Privacy” and increase the slider to at least medium.” This will block all third party cookies that do now have a privacy policy. You may also choose to increase it to block all cookies.

You can find maps, day planners, mortgage calculators, and much more, but what in the world is a "widget"? Web widgets started to become important in 2007, but in 2008 they have almost become a given. Widgets are often small self contained programs that perform a specific task. Widgets are generally based on a web 2.O social media platform, such as RSS feeds and blogging.In layman’s terms, a "widget" is a small portion of a web site program that has been boxed up to perform a small task.

EXAMPLE: A mortgage calculator is a "widget" that simply takes a persons' input for mortgage and interest rates, the duration of a loan, and it calculates a monthly payment.

This "widget" can then be added to a website, and even saved to you computer's desktop. A good place to see "widgets" in action would be at Yahoo. com; there, you will find a list of cool "widgets".

If you are a web site owner, then there should be no reason for not have statistical data about your site. You should have a basic understanding of your visitors traffic patterns (What they are doing on your site), refering sites (Where did they come from on the internet, search phrases and words (What search words were used to find your site). At first this may seem to be hard information to come by, but Google offers free web analyticsThis is a very power tool that will help you to gauge how well your site is designed, what visitors are most interested in on your site, what they are least interested in and so much more. If you are a web site owner this is not something that you should over look. If you are afraid of all the "tech. stuff", you may also consider have your web developer set this up for you.

Can't find your web site on major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, or MSN? This may help, first visit your favorite search engine and search for web site registration.

EX:
Type: "Google web site registration" into Google.

This should take you to Google's add a URL page to register your site. Fill out the information and Google or your favorite search engine will spider (crawl through the text and information) your site to begin listing it. You can do the same for Yahoo. Next week we will take a look at more ways to improve your page rating but this will put you off to a good start.