A lot of time and energy is being spent on the Online Marketing of political parties around the world and South Africa is one of those, but have they made the most of it?

We have decided to do a bit of research between two South African Political Parties, the DA (Democratic Alliance) and the ANC (African National Congress) to see whose marketing is outdoing the others.

You can find our research in the table below:

(Please note that the information above has been taken on the 19th of May 2011 and does not reflect changes made by either party after this date)

Well according to the above research, both parties have a long way to go in terms of Online Marketing and there is a lot of room to grow. Many basic SEO tactics, especially on-site SEO needs some work.

There are many other factors that we have not looked into in terms of online marketing strategies, like the use of “Canonical Meta Tags”, “dofollow” and “nofollow” links, Dublin Core usage, site speed, the number of followers within the different social networks, blogs, search advertising  etc.

It seems that this form of marketing has not been focussed greatly on by either party and it will be interesting to see how things go in future for the DA and the ANC’s online marketing strategies. Online Marketing has proven to help other political parties and the elections in other countries.

We’ll focus on more SEO, Social Networking, Search Engine Rankings and Site Distribution factors over the next few weeks to see which of the two South African Political Parties seem to have some sort of edge.

Please give your opinion on the parties’ websites, marketing tactics and techniques below. We are interested!