Improve Your Google Rankings!

Google is adding a new feature to its searches that provide more opportunity for informed search engine marketers ("SEM") to improve their listings. The new feature is additional links that are included within the search engine results listing to take searchers directly to relevant information within a target page of results. A good description of the new feature is provided in this blog post. The objective of the feature is to provide the searcher with more focused results when they are available and identified properly. The goal of the SEM is to take advantage of this new feature to provide more focused results for the search engine (Google) and the searcher.

The key to accomplishing this is to first segment your content pages to provide very focused subsections within the text. A good illustration of this and the following points can be found on the American Heart Association site. When you look at this page, pay special attention to two features; one, that page is divided into sections with captions identifying the topic in each, and, second, there is a "table of contents" at the top of the page that jumps to the "bookmarks" associated with the captions identifying each section. These are the necessary steps to getting the new Google feature to work for you. The code that establishes the bookmark will look something like this ("<a id="HDL" name="HDL">") in the html of your page.

A description of the "named anchors" concept is provided in this blog post. Reviewing this post while examining the American Heart Association page and its source code should make this enhancement easy to understand and implement on your site.

Search engine marketing is always changing, and the best way to keep abreast of the latest information is regular attendance at the free Internet Marketing Clinic offered twice a month at the UH Small Business Development Center.