What are five steps I should take to help control my company’s Google search results?

Barbara Coll, CEO of WebMama:

1. Increase the amount of text-based content visible to visitors on your corporate website.

2. Write unique meta-description tags (an html element) using the top converting keywords or category words you want to own so you will be highly visible in search results. Write unique tags for every page. The meta description tag should be two sentences long and focus on what visitors would think if all they saw was the first five or six words. Include your company name and major brand names. Maximum of 25 words. [do not worry about the meta keyword tag for search visibility purposes}

3. Write unique title tags for all pages. Make them six to eight words long and consider putting the brand name of the company at the end not the beginning. Each title tag should convey the content of the page and include the top converting or category words you want to own.

4. Build lead generation into each content page. Google cares about rich, relevant content. Lead-generation pages, especially those developed with Marketo or Eloqua, don’t tend to have much content so they are not highly visible in search results. If they are landing pages for special campaigns and you don’t want them visible in search results, take action to prevent that.

5. Optimize external websites that you control. Have you looked at your company LinkedIn page lately? Does the description contain your top converting keywords and all brands? What about Wikipedia? So many corporate Wikipedia pages have large banners that say the page is going to be deleted if someone doesn’t pay attention to it. How about Crunchbase, Twitter, and Facebook? Any place where you control the content should be optimized.