This is in large part due to their advanced Search Algorithm that helps determine where a website should be positioned in their search engine results page (SERPS). But with the rapid rise of “live web” or social media sites, the web tends to be dominated by social book marketing sites as well as viral videos, and sometimes, not in a good way (at least not in Google’s eyes). This has lead to the beginning steps of Google changing their algorithms again, which is going to be a good thing for your business and when searching on the major search engines.
These new steps by Google are an attempt to prevent what we call “Black Hat SEO” – the unscrupulous optimisation (spamming) of a website by using often illegal methods such as page hi-jacking, cloaking, link blasting, and other methods. As Google gets smarter in dealing with the search spammers, they get smarter in terms of getting around new Google updates. Every time this has happened in the past, we have been able to adjust our Search Engine Optimisation methods to ensure compliance with Google. And now, we are adapting again to Google’s attempt to stop “Live Web” spamming and how they look at incoming links.
The upcoming changes by Google will lead us into a new era of web design and search called Personalized Search Optimization (PSO). This new search focus will be dominated by great content on a website, effective blogging and social media, quality videos and podcasts that engage your audience, and basically your site will be ranked on how well your site effectively personalises content to your audience. People will no longer be able to “trick” the search engines to achieve a high ranking, you will have to develop great content and use advanced search engine optimisation and social media marketing to effectively market your site on Google.
Also, search rankings in Google will be heavily influenced by Google analytics – tracking the conversion rate of your site and goals, bounce rate, and more. If you aren’t using analytics now, you better start or have a Certified Google Analytics Consultant at Vudu help you set this up and manage this for your business. Google is going to be using the data from analytics to determine the relevancy of your site which will affect your search engine positioning amongst other things. And if you have a Google Adwords PPC campaign running, and you have a low click through rate or poor conversions, Google is going to take this into account as well as to how your site will rank organically.
These changes by Google are all about delivering quality search results and a quality user experience to Google users. We all want to search for a product or service and have it deliver exactly what we want without having to skim through page after page of irrelevant websites. With these new changes and Personalized Search Optimization (PSO), the user experience will increase dramatically, but it will make it that much more difficult to drive quality traffic to your site without the help of an expert.