It has to be considered a bit of a science where fragments of computer code decides the ranking of your website in the SERPs. The exact elements of what constitutes your sites structure determines where your webpages end up on the search engines. So are your page results on the first page of Google or do they some how mysteriously appear on page 30.
Whether it may be indirectly related to how Google and their ever changing algorithm decides to score your particular domain as well as its pages for ranking purposes, hopefully these following reasons carries a bit of reasoning.
In the final tally, these suggestions could simply prove to be considered best practices ensuring for the optimum end user experience, something that these search engine providers has been pleading and requesting from the community that is the Web professionals ever since their existence.
Never think that these search engines are not paying any attention to you, as they definitely are. At the least, the quality of a users experience will usually result in obtaining the same quality of inbound links. Websites that employ rich and intelligent site architecture hierarchy as well as relevant content organization, will more than likely generate a lot more page views as well as time spent on a site.
Those Web professionals who are and should by paying attention to the recent Google sting operation on sites who they felt didn’t deserve the rankings they were getting, should be able to conclude whether click stream data plays an important role in ranking, as it’s easy to determine how it can.
Search Engines Following User Patterns
If these major search engines are following user search patterns directly from their search results, they will then be able to see the detailed levels of interaction created by those users. Not saying that the search engines do this, but it does make sense that this can be an extremely valuable piece of information, as they will then be able to identify those sites providing the best user experience. This determined by the popularity and the number of page views it gets, as well as the length of time spent on a site or the websites that they visit directly after.
The Role Domains Play In SEO
Another possible element of SEO success, which is only hypothetical of course, is how much influence a domain name has on rankings.
So does the search engines take into account for ranking purposes:
• The length of years a domain is registered
• The history of the domain’s registration
• How long the domain has been owned by the current owner
• The number of times it has changed hands
• How many times it’s been renewed, or
• How many IP addresses (Web Hosts) it has used
All these may or may not be used as indicators on how well a particular site can be trusted.
The influence that a particular domain name has on a sites ranking, or its position in the search engine results remain questionable, as there are much better and more obvious indicators on which a particular site is ranked.
Other possible indicators regarding particular relevancy of a website along with its content and domain, includes the use and inclusion of a website’s feeds. How often that a particular site appears in local listings, or how often it appears on trusted online news sources. Just like directories at one time provided an increased and measurable boost to a sites rankings, the precise distribution of how links are placed matters greatly today.
Rankings Based On User Popularity
It now depends greatly on gauging website user signals, allowing for consumer driven indications on how important or relevant a piece of content on a site may actually be. Both Google as well as Bing has full and complete access to Twitter as their presence is pretty obvious. Their direct impact even more so.
Sharing site content items on Twitter as well as other significant social destinations such as Facebook, and having that content liked and re-shared by friends or followers, has proven to virtually guarantee inclusion in the major search result rankings.
Socially Inspired SEO
There’s those words again, social interaction and social media. Social media involvement and activity helps the major search engines identify the quality as well as the quantity of ‘user’ signals that are surrounding your site or brand. Search engines are now actively working and aligned to be able to identify who “Shared” or “reTweeted” what, as well as determining the public association between them.
So how can you take more of a social approach towards SEO? One social media strategy you could use is providing useful relevant content based on what your followers are interested in or talking about. But SEO factors also dictate what and which content should be included to address trending topics.
So the solution may be to look for certain opportunities around a particular popular subject for which you may already have existing content for, and then provide social user access to that content. Social media is not really about content distribution alone, but rather the results, the aftermath and the activity surrounding that content. So it depends on how well that content is distributed as well as to what degree the engagement happens. To promote this activity, it’s important that you include visible “Sharing” options on your site.
So in terms of an actual usable strategy of getting your visitors to actually share, make sure that you have options such as Facebooks ‘Like’ button as well as Twitters “Retweet” button visible and available. Much too often, the majority of marketers think that providing each and every possible social media sharing options can be too annoying and distracting to their site visitors. So if that’s the case, then just provide access to only Twitter and Facebook for example. Include the ones which you are actively encouraging participation to.
So if you were looking for a specific shortcut to SEO success, there really are no guaranteed strategies as you well know. But what we may have determined from looking at the various SERPs and then conducting some competitive research, is that search engines are rewarding those websites that over a period of time, has been creating as well as establishing some authority through valid and real credible link citations that’s sent as well as responded to by users from social sources. So make every effort into creating a site experience as meaningful and useful to your site visitors as possible, designing it to attract relevant links, which appeals greatly to the search engines.