Online Traction

Search engines are smarter than you think.

This is good if you, like most folks, are looking for something on the web. It is also why search engines such as Google are so popular (and why the verb ‘google’ is listed in the Oxford American English dictionary). Its not so good if your business has not kept up with what might be called search engine standards and/or if you are not aware of the explosive growth in search engine use: +55% between ‘04 and ‘05

This article outlines just how sophisticated search engines have become and what you need to know for your site to persistently rank well in the top search engines.

Search engines rank sites higher that are relevant, popular, and active. These qualities directly determine your search engine ranking and, more than likely, your bottom line. For this reason these should be considered as ‘production values’ in the creation or modification of your site.

Popularity - determined by the number and quality of links that point to your site and is related to the volume of traffic that passes from those links to your site. This is the most effective way to improve your search engine rankings. Buy, borrow and barter or do what it takes to get inbound, one-way or reciprocal links to your site.

There are three common methods.

1. submit your site to online directories such as google directory, Yahoo and ODP
2. (and arguably better) is to find quality sites that complement your site and to request a link. This is time-consuming but the payoff is great in terms of increased ranking. Remember, the search engine is sophisticated; aim for quality links to your site (see next paragraph on relevance)
3. quality content (interesting, useful, entertaining) such that other sites link to your site without request or in the best of cases your site takes on viral qualities and is passed around the web by happy visitors to your site. Writing style is extremely important for web content; I will address this in a future post.

Relevance - your web page content must include keywords and metatags (the programming code that makes a web page) that correspond to a user’s search query. Also, sites must be optimized for link relevance on two levels.

1. are the sites that link to you relevant to your niche?
2. do the sites that you link to contain content that is relevant to your niche?

There is a whole industry out there based on link building strategies that are all too often irrelevant to the client’s website. The bell is tolling for this industry and I wish them well in their future endeavours. Long live relevant links and content!

Active - Assuming that the recent google patent application is an indication of intent then the game is about to change again. Google, if its not already doing so, plans to look at a sites historical clickstream data (in short: what you do on a site). Not only can a search engine now find out when your site/page was created and modified it (at least Google) can now match this measure of how recently updated your page/site is to to everything else it knows about your site. Gathered from its myriad googleware (google search, google analytics, google adwords advertising, google toolbar etc.) Google will base its evaluation and ranking of a website based on an analysis of real user behavior. Clickstream data is the evidence of quality of a website because it shows user behavior by revealing site visit duration, whether the site was bookmarked, how many pages a user visited etc.

More so than ever the search engines are rewarding quality websites and are using real user behavior as their benchmark of quality.

In the beginning all you had to do was create an index page with text and your site would be indexed by a search engine. Now it has become a lot more difficult to get, and keep, your site ranked high in the top search engines. More and more search engines are getting smart to the tricks that have traditionally undermined the relevance of user searches.

Whichever way you look at it search engines and the way people use them are constantly evolving. For many businesses and non-profit organizations it is time to get with the program if they are to stay competitive.

ps. A lot of the information for this article comes from the Google patent application from May 2005.