Since Todd and Tom have recently critiqued Barack Obama's presidential website — apparently in its Blue Period — I was also thinking about the design of 2008 presidential candidate sites.

As someone with a search engine optimization (SEO) background, I probably focus a little bit more on title tags and anchor link text when evaluating a site than a someone who looks at the pretty pictures (or the lack thereof).

Well, I'm not alone.  Li Evans of the Search Marketing Gurus blog does as well, and has done some interesting campaign site evaluations from an SEO's perspective.  You can find them in the Political Internet Marketing category of the blog.

In these posts she discusses various SEO topics like page titles, keyword usage, and the actual content found on a site.  Further, she does look at a campaign's search marketing efforts, if any, and use of social media.  Her posts are worth a read.

So far, here are the candidate (or former ones) sites that she's reviewed:

• Joe Biden
• Chris Dodd
• Duncan Hunter
• Dennis Kucinich
• John McCain
• Barack Obama
• Ron Paul
• Bill Richardson
• Fred Thompson

Disclosure.