Good SEO Means Thinking and Acting Like the Internet - User Behavior and Modern Search Engines

A few months ago I've learned this golden rule from John Reese: "If you want to have success on the Internet, you need to think and act like the Internet". Since then, I've been thinking of how to apply this natural principle for my websites and I've found out that what we used to call SEO it's actually going to be history, just because of this simple principle.

We are too focused on how to get indexed faster, how to get our pages to rank first, but this is a little bit backwards if we think of this simple principle. Search engines make huge efforts to serve the user, while we only make huge efforts to serve the search engines. This is why we always need to change our SEO strategy. We're focused on the search engines, always improving their algorithms, not on the people, always searching for good content. Good content is good content while today's new algorithm will always be tomorrow's old one.

I'm going to show you why the current algorithm it's not going to last and why you need to restructure your marketing now to catch the next wave.

Classic search engines

As we already know, search engines have the same basic parts:
- a crawler
- an index
- a search interface

At this point, I think you can easily recognize each part so, it's useless to explain here what every part is about.

An artificial voting system

Also, classic search results are based on an artificial instrument called "incoming links". Why are incoming links an artificial instrument? Well, it's very simple: when a common user (not a SEO) likes an article and wants to link to that article, it is highly improbable for him to make a research and link with the most relevant anchor text for that article. He will probably link like in one of the following examples (the text in bold stays for link):
1. Here is John's article.
2. Click here to read John's article.
3. Click here for more details.

In my opinion, regular users are not interested in John's rankings for a specific keyword, they are interested in adding value to their page by adding John's information, so, THEIR visitors can better understand the presented idea. To me, a link like the following looks very unnatural for a regular user:

Have a look at John's SEO website.

When I see this kind of links, the first thing that comes into my mind is: "Ok... I think this guy is some kind of partner with John...".

But, an interesting new (I hope) idea came into my mind when watching a Digital Ethnography video about Web 2.0. Pay attention to the YouTube video (to watch the video, make sure you visit my blog).

I don't know if you noticed it, but the new concept that I want to share with you is presented at 3:18 in the video. You may want to watch it again, but, anyway, these are the words that caught my attention before I came up with the idea:

"When we post and then tag pictures we are teaching the Machine Each time we forge a link we teach it an idea."

Got it?

Modern search engines

I don't really know who these guys are, what their background is and what do they know about search engines, I don't even know if this is a fact or only their desire, but, if not already implemented, I'm sure this sentence will rule the next generation search engines. User behavior can be the best way to teach search engines if a piece of content is relevant for a certain keyword. So, do we have a new part added to the classic three parts of the search engines?

How can this be possible?

It's true that most search engines only use static components when deciding what pages to show first for a certain keyword (like indexed content and links), but let's think about the most important search engine, Google, because, as I'm writing this, Google is considered the search engine with the best relevancy. Before Google, search engines could only follow user behavior on their own website, because, once a user clicks on a search result, he actually leaves the search engine. But Google is different. One of the Google Labs products is designed to do just this: to track user behavior on other sites, while helping the webmasters to track their visitors and their conversions - the product is called Google Analytics, and you're probably using it already.

Idea paths

When a search engine can follow the full user path, it is very easy to decide which is the content that a certain user found useful for the specific keyword and, the next time, it will rank better the useful content. The modern search engine can see then if a user hits the "back" button after visiting a search result, how much time he spends on that page before hitting the "back" button, what links he follows on that specific website and if that specific website is the final destination for that keyword. Modern search engines can use all these tools to provide better search result and to be relevant for the users.

Conclusion

I'll say it again: I don't really know if Google or any other search engines are currently using analytics to improve their search results, but, if the goal of the search engines is to provide quality results, the only way to define quality is to see the web through the users eyes so, prepare to completely change your marketing strategy in order to catch the next wave.

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02 Dec 2008 22:21:17

If I Have to Buy One Search Engine in 2009 - Motley Fool

New Zealand Herald If I Have to Buy One Search Engine in 2009 Motley Fool - I'll kick this off by taking a look at search engines. There were 7.8 billion searches performed in this country in October, according to Nielsen Online. ... Another rumor lifts Yahoo's shares Microsoft, Yahoo coy as reports of new search deal surface Former AOL Chief Seeks Funds for Yahoo Deal -

More details: http://fool.com/investing/high-growth/2008/12/02/if-i-have-t~.aspx

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