The About the District page is where you talk about the unique challenges facing your constituency. It can echo the content in your issues page(s). But all that aside, the primary purpose for the About The District page is to boost your search engine performance.
There are no magic tricks to SEO anymore, just some basic rules that if you follow, your site will start to get some traction over time.
The first and best thing I recommend to boost your SEO is to get inbound links coming in from other sites. Any coverage of you or your campaign in the press should link back to your Nation. If there are stories that have already run, contact the author and ask for the story to be updated with a link to the Nation. This is true even in negative stories - the search engine doesn't know the difference.
Always use your whole name ("Abraham Lincoln" as opposed to "Abraham" or "Abe" or "Mr. Lincoln"). Where possible, use your whole name in conjunction with your campaign ("Abraham Lincoln for City Supervisor"). Make sure the entire campaign name is spelled out at least once per paragraph. I also recommend doing that throughout the entire site.
Next, make a list of all of the search terms in which you want the site to come up in. If Mr. Lincoln were running for San Francisco City Supervisor, District 11, these would be the search terms I would focus on:
Abraham Lincoln for Supervisor
Abre Lincoln for Supervisor
District 11 San Francisco election
District 11 San Francisco race
San Francisco District 11 2016 race
San Francisco Supervisor election 2016
Supervisor candidates in San Francisco in 2016
etc. etc. Make that list.
Now, on your About the District page, write four or five paragraphs that include every single one of those phrases. It doesn't have to win a writing contest, it just as to have all of those phrases. Repeated, if possible. Remember, the "About the District" page is a throwaway page that very few people will read, because most people already know enough about their district; they are not on your site to learn more about their district, they are on the site to learn more about you.
Finally, time is a factor in search engine performance. It takes time to build up "Google Juice". It takes time for your page to start percolating up the search results once you publish. If you put off creating this page until the final weeks of your campaign, you are not doing yourself any favors. Because of the nature of SEO, I highly recommend you have this page ready to go the very day you launch.
To recap:
- Inbound links,
- changing every occurrence of the name to the full name
- adding the name + race often (at least once per page)
- writing the About the District page
