Search engines adapt to the times we live in. There is no doubt about that. Google makes around 500 small algorithm changes per year, so there you have it from big G itself. Anyhow these are small tweaks that don’t have a noticeable impact on search results. Not until the Panda update at least.
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Search Engine Optimization With the recent Panda updates Google’s ranking algorithm has been changed quite a bit. As you may know, according to Google, almost 12% of the United States search quires were impacted by this update that was rolled out back in February of 2011. And things aren’t stopping here. In June 2011 Google rolled out version 2.2 of the Panda Update, trying to improve even more the end user experience. On top of that Google also made several recommendations on what webmaster should do in order to build “high quality” websites. Another noticeable thing is that Google decided to launch the “+1 button” – their own version on Facebook “Like” button. All this stuff slowly ads up and make webmasters and SEOs think twice about their internet strategy.
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What does this mean?
To be short in answer, this means than SEO people just got a whole lot of work to do than before. SEO as we know it, is pretty much keyword oriented. Better keyword research, better keyword optimized content and better backlinks (with the right anchor text) means better ranking. Well, not anymore.
Looking at the recent updates I was talking about above, it seems like Google puts more and more weight on the social aspect of the things. Google tries to analyze the webpages through the eyes of a human instead of the eyes of a machine. Design starts to matter, user experience matters and brand or trust starts to play a role in the ranking algorithm.
Is it just me or SEO has become more like Internet Marketing? Anyway, as I said, SEOs now have a lot more things to look after. They need a marketing strategy. I am not saying keyword research won’t matter anymore or that backlinks are no longer important, they still are, but other aspects come into play as well.
Also see : How To Improve SEO of Your Company’s Website
Here are a few of the new things to look after when you are working on your search engine optimization:
Time on site
I don’t know about you, but this is a very important metric for me. I check my “Time on site” parameter each time I log into my traffic reporting page. A high value means engaging content that could result in a push up in the search results.
Imagine a blog with time on site value of 2 seconds, in a niche that most blogs average a 2 minutes time on site. Even though it might have great backlinks and SEO-ed content, for some reason people won’t enjoy browsing that blog. That could be a signal for Google.
Bounce rate
Another thing I like to watch is the “Bounce rate” of my blog. I see no reason why a search engine would not consider this parameter when judging the quality of a website or blog. Depending on the niche you are in the bounce rate can vary but getting a value that is below the average can affect your rankings.
Social media
As you can hear everyone else saying there days, blogging has become more and more social. Getting lots of Likes on Facebook or a nice amount of Twitter followers could ring a bell in the new Google algorithm. All this signs – people following you or voting for you or like you – mean that they want to see you in the results page of their query and Google will take note of that.
Also see : Optimize Site Content for Social Media with These 4 Effective Tactics
Design
The looks of your blog matter. Many of the websites that got pushed down in the rankings by the Panda update had really bad design. One of them, and probably the best example is EzineArticles, who lost 50% of the traffic.
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Conclusion
What I am trying to say here is that Google is starting to “listen” to the audience (the end users) and include the data they collect from them in the ranking algorithm. Search engines are becoming some sort of hybrid between machines and humans taking the search experience to the next level and webmasters need to adapt to that.
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