Marketing in the Age of Google: Your Online Strategy IS Your Business Strategy, Revised and Updated

RANKING

As we’ve seen throughout this book, ranking is based on what pages search engines have calculated to be most relevant to what they have determined the searcher is looking for. You can’t influence how the engines interpret searcher intent, but you can ensure your pages are as relevant as possible for target queries. The bottom line, of course, is to understand your customers and what they are looking for and provide exactly that. But on a more tactical level, relevance is based in large part on your site’s content and on external links. We discussed both content and links in Chapter 6, but following are technical implementation details about the content.

Page Components

In the section on content architecture in Chapter 6, I talked about the importance of including primary keywords in the page components. These components include page titles, meta descriptions, and heading tags, as described next. Key to making this work within an organization is ensuring that these components can be easily changed without requiring code change or launch. The content management system or other mechanism for building content should enable marketers, content writers, and others to easily change this text.

Page Titles

The page title is what’s contained in the element in the source code and appears in the browser title bar. This text is important because it’s what appears as the default title of a bookmark and generally is the title of the page in the search results. When possible, this tag should ...