Marketing in the Age of Google: Your Online Strategy Is Your Business Strategy

Chapter 7. Working with Developers

How to Turn Business Strategy into Tech Speak

As noted in Chapter 6, a site's technical infrastructure is a vital part of search acquisition. If the search engine bots can't crawl and extract content from a site's pages, that site has little chance of ranking well in search engines for relevant queries. In addition, changing a site's content management system or server setup, merging sites after an acquisition, building micro sites and other common activities can greatly impact search acquisition.

Web developers should understand the principles of searchability and build them into the infrastructure and should have a set of best practices for modifying that infrastructure and troubleshooting problems. This chapter provides an overview of the technical issues involved with search acquisition. (You can find more detailed discussion at marketing intheageofgoogle.com.) You can use this chapter either to give directly to your Web developers, or if you're interested in the technical details, it can help you better understand the technical issues so you can have productive conversations with the development team about how best to build search best practices into the development process.

In order for search best practices to be successfully implemented in Web development, the development team needs executive support. This means the developers need to be given the training to expand their core skill set into understanding how to make Web infrastructure searchable, ...