Google became popular. Page Rankhelps Google deliver relevant results since it counts
each link from another site as a vote. However, not all votes are equal – Google gives
greater weight to links from pages which themselves have high Page Rank and where the
link anchor text or adjacent text contains text relevant to the keyphrase. Google’s Page
Rank algorithm is what initially made it successful, but it was published by the founders
and now a similar technique is used by all the main search engines. It has been refined to
identify sites that are ‘authority sites’ for a particular type of search. For keyphrases where
there is a lot of competition such as ‘car insurance’, the quantity and quality of inbound
links may even be more important than keyphrase density in determining ranking.
Inclusion in directories such as Yahoo! or Business.com (for which a fee is payable) or
the Open Directory (www.dmoz.org, which is currently free) is important since it can
assist in boosting Page Rank.3 Title HTML tag
The keywords in the title tag of a web page that appears at the top of a browser window
are indicated in the HTML code by the <TITLE> keyword. This is significant in search
engine listings since if a keyphrase appears in a title it is more likely to be listed highly
than if it is only in the body text of a page. It follows that each page on a site should
have a specific title giving the name of a company and the product, service or offer fea-
tured on a page. Greater weighting is given to keyphrases at the left of the title tag and
those with a higher keyphrase density. The Title HTML tag is also vital in search market-
ing since this is typically the text underlined within the search results page which forms
a hyperlink through to your web site. If the Title tag appearing on the search results page
is a relevant call-to-action that demonstrates relevance you will receive more clicks
which equals more visits (incidentally, Google will monitor clickthroughs to a site and
will determine that your content is relevant too and boost position accordingly).4 Meta-tags
Meta-tagsare part of the HTML file, typed in by web page creators, which is read by the
search engine spider or robot. They are effectively hidden from users, but are used by
some search engines when robots or spiders compile their index. In the past, search
engines assigned more relevance to a site containing keyphrases in its meta-tags than
one that didn’t. Search engine spamming of meta-tags resulted in this being an inaccu-
rate method of assessing relevance and Google has reported that it assigns no relevance
to meta-tags. However, other search engines such as ‘Yahoo! Search’ do assign some rele-
vance to meta-tags, so it is best practice to incorporate these and to change them for
each page with distinct content. There are two important meta-tags which are specified
at the top of an HTML page using the <meta name=“”> HTML keyword:(a) The ‘keywords’ meta-tag highlights the key topics covered on a web page.Example: <meta name=“keywords” content=“book, books, shop, store, book shop,
bookstore, publisher, bookshop, general, interest, departments,”>(b) The ‘description’ meta-tag denotes the information which will be displayed in the
search results page and so is very important to describe what the web site offers to
encourage searchers to click through to the site.
Example: <meta name=“description” content=“The largest online book store in
the world.”>
Other meta-tags are used to give other information such as the type of tool used to
create the web page. Remember that incorporating the names of competitors is now not
only underhand, but case law in the UK has demonstrated it is illegal.CHAPTER 8· INTERACTIVE MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS
Page Rank
A scale between 0 to 10
used by Google to
assess the importance
of web sites according
to the number of
inbound links or
backlinks.
Meta-tags
Keywords that are part
of an HTML page that
result in a higher
search listing if they
match the typed
keyword.