“What is this page about?”
As marketers, helping search engines answer that basic question is one of our most important tasks. Search engines can’t read pages like humans can, so we incorporate structure and clues as to what our content means. This helps provide the relevance element of search engine optimization that matches queries to useful results.
Understanding the techniques used to capture this meaning helps to provide better signals as to what our content relates to, and ultimately helps it to rank higher in search results. This post explores a series of on-page techniques that not only build upon one another, but can be combined in sophisticated ways.
While Google doesn’t reveal the exact details of its algorithm, over the years we’ve collected evidence from interviews, research papers, US patent filings and observations from hundreds of search marketers to be able to explore these processes. Special thanks to Bill Slawski, whose posts on SEO By the Sea led to much of the research for this work.
As you read, keep in mind these are only some of the ways in which Google could determine on-page relevancy, and they aren’t absolute law! Experimenting on your own is always the best policy.
We’ll start with the simple, and move to the more advanced.
