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Google explains search rankings after complaints in Europe
Google has offered a general explanation of how it ranks its search results, one day after the European Commission said it was looking into antitrust complaints against the company.
In a blog post Thursday, Google Fellow Amit Singhal also referred to a recent op-ed piece suggesting that regulators should control how search engines rank results. He stressed that developing search rankings is very difficult, implying perhaps that regulating search would be hard for any government to do well.
Laying out the challenge, Singhal said Google processes hundreds of millions of queries a day, with at least 20 percent of them totally new. To handle the volume and variety of queries, the company uses a collection of algorithms to sift through data.
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What Can or Should Be Included in a Page Title?
Page title is the most prominent element of the page. It influences major aspects of your website performance:
- it affects rankings (as search engines consider it when judging what the page is about);
- it affects clickthrough (as that is what people mainly focus on when looking through search results).
Now let’s look into elements that should / can be included in a page title depending on your website/ business/ this given page purposes:
1. The page targeted key terms (well, an obvious one): if you want both people and crawlers understand what the page is going to be about, make sure the title uses your keywords (one key phrases per title, don’t repeat it twice);
2. Company phone number: like Loren previously said, that might be a great idea if you are most interested in direct phone calls. Besides, both Internet Explorer and FireFox (by default) will highlight the phone number and make it clickable. You can then get phone calls from people landing at the search results even before they enter your site.
3. Business location: by indicating your country, state and city in the title you can:
- increase your chances to rank well in local search;
- get some additional rankings for [keyword +your location] long tail searches.
Again, this should be done if the above is what your business needs. It’s a good idea to include location in the ‘Contact us’ and ‘About Us’ pages.
4. The product price can be given on product pages if you offer (comparatively) low prices. This can increase the clickthrough considerably.
Beware though of Google cache (especially if your site is not re-cached often): if you change your pricing, people will still be able to see old pricing within Google SERPs.
5. The company name: if you care about branding, this will help you a lot. Your brand name will repeatedly pop up in SERPs and people will start recognizing it much quicker.
