A lesser explored side of the SEO world is manifesting and making itself increasingly visible with each new feature or search whitepaper released over the past year or so. Still, the area of user data and its impact on SEO remains a grey area for most of those active in the SEO community. With the ability to change the game as we know it, I think it’s about time we paid some much needed attention to usage data and its SEO potential.
With the proliferation of social media it seems we can’t go a few days without hearing some rumors of future “real time search” or social integration into Google. It’s quite evident at this point that Google is quite interested in social media, be it Twitter, Facebook, Digg, or some other “hot” web app (See this for example: Google in Talks to Acquire Twitter). More recently, the “caffeine” update that Google pushed out seems to favor fresh content and place increased emphasis on onpage content (a necessary shift to provide fresher content), not to mention the connotations of the word ‘caffeine’.
If you take a step back and look at the SEO status quo, so to speak, where link building is often the make or break component of a successful search engine optimization campaign, the idea of user data isn’t a new one. The very idea of ranking sites based on inbound link popularity is social in its essence, right? Google figured out that more often than not, a site with substantial incoming links was a higher quality site than one with less inbound links. It didn’t take long for the SEOs of the world to figure out how to manipulate their incoming link profile and achieve top ranks for irrelevant terms, thus negating Googles plan to offer the most relevant results to their users. While Google has remained on top, both traffic wise and relevancy wise (in my opinion), a great deal of effort is being allocated to increase relevancy and offset manipulative SEO practices (examples being TrustRank, SearchWiki and SideWiki). Even Microsoft has stepped up to the plate with the relatively unknown BrowseRank.
So, the question here is not “is it going to happen?”, but “how will it effect my SEO efforts?”. To answer this, let’s take a look at a recent article from SEOmoz.
In the fantastic Search Engine Ranking Factors 2009, SEOmoz asked a panel of experts a variety of questions about usage data and its impact on SEO. The topics of the questions are a good source of the information that could be used to impact rankings and the current opinions of a wide range of SEO experts: (in order of most likely to least likely to have an effect)
- Historical Click-Through Rate from Search Results to the Exact Page/URL
- Historical Click-Through Rate from Search Results to Pages on this Domain
- Search Queries for the Domain Name or Associated Brand
- Use of Query Refinement Post-Click on a Search Result
- Average “Time on Page” Duration
- Data from Google’s SearchWiki Voting, Ratings, Comments
- References/Links to the Domain in Gmail Emails
I think we can expand this to include social usage as well, tweets, facebook shares and social bookmarks. If real time search were to become a reality I’d think these metrics would play a substantial part in the ranking algorithm. So, given the abilities of the search engines to collect usage data, how can we plan accordingly and optimize our sites?
Here are some (primarily whitehat) ideas:
- One way to perform well would be to increase the quality of your sites and the “stickiness factor”.
- Make sure your content is engaging and encourages a visitor to spend a good amount of time on the site.
- Focus on conversion optimization – facilitate a high pageview interaction to lower your bounce rate and the possibility of a click back to the results page.
- Optimize your page titles to entice clickthroughs.
Some more creative (I’d like to think these are greyhat at worst) ideas:
- Use Mechanical Turk and buy actions – Hire 500 people to click your search result for your keyword and give a positive review on SideWiki/SearchWiki, also have them stay longer on the page, view multiple pages, tweet, share on facebook, etc.
- Link to the Google redirect for your keyword: Such as this link (http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=6&ved=0CB0QFjAF&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.terrygodier.com%2F&rct=j&q=terry+godier&ei=7kDbSsOXEY-MMrvP7ecH&usg=AFQjCNE8HztYigLMjuFY0HEfrS6xsnCFdQ), which is the Google redirect for the keyword ‘Terry Godier’. However, this url string will likely become (if it isn’t already) dynamic and based on session data, so exploiting this may/may not be of any benefit.
- Implement interactive features on page, such as neat mouse effects that people will play with (this brings to mind the gimicky javascript example that traps the mouse in the page thereby not allowing the user to exit).
In closing, it’s important to note that we still don’t have a definitive timeframe for when usage data will become a decisive factor in the search ranking process. Some of us, myself included, hope the idea just dies, as it seems the benefits are far outweighed by the consequences (misuse: negatively interacting with competitors sites, promoting Google’s idea of quality content – that is: content with low bounce rates, informational bias and substantial branding, etc). But, being prepared and knowledgeable is as essential to SEO as it is to business in general, so I hope to see more conversation about this topic amongst the SEO crowd before we’re substantially behind the curve… and besides, do we really need another rehashed “Top 10 Ways to Get Links” article?
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