I absolutely agree with the comments in iHealthBeat’s article about the sub-optimization of the White House’s new health reform website. Why go to all the work of creating a new media-rich site and not optimize it for the masses to find?

Though the meta keyword tag is not used by the major search engines, a look at the Reality Check site shows that its writers are more worried about nabbing searchers who spell Barack Obama’s name wrong than getting folks who are curious about health reform to the site. Unfortunately, it’s not clear that the staffers who threw the site together understand search engine marketing and optimization at all. They don’t even have ‘Barack Obama’ in text for the bots to find (the president’s name is only in a graphic and an alt tag).

Our SEO team’s recommendations? Write a better title. Embed in the content common search terms like  “Obamacare,”  “healthcare coverage” and “health bill,” as the authors of the article suggest.  Deploy a suite of online analytical tools including AdWords, WordTracker, Google Analytics and others to identify additional popular search terms related to health reform. Create keyword-rich anchor text and cross-link to the various .gov sites. If that sounds like too much work for our government friends, they could simply hire us to put Reality Check at the top of the search results.