Google has long tuned its algorithms to take search positions out of the hands of Webmasters and into the hands of searchers.

Among the many ways Google accomplishes this is by measuring click thru popularity. Google does this by tracking how often a search return is clicked. Does the searcher stay on the site or return to search results? How long does the searcher stay on the site? What pages are searchers frequently visiting? If the searcher stays on the search results, then search positioning improves. If the searcher quickly returns to Google and goes to another site, then search positions suffer.

To optimize for this Google behavior, give your target audience more to read or do. The result is that visitors will stay on your site longer, and Google will reward better search positions.

Provide your online audience with complete information about your organization, its products and services. Google does not reward online brochures. Remember - valuable and interesting content is king!

Engage your online audience with the issues affecting your niche. Start a Blog that comments on your industry's events. Write White Papers that describe your vision. Develop forums to discuss the issues. Allow your visitors to interact and provide their input on the subject.

Focus these actions on keywords, then optimize the new content for the keywords. Link to these pages with keyword text links.

Take these actions with humans in mind, and the search engines will follow.

Labels: Organic SEO

Many people confuse link popularity as being only the root domains popularity. More and more, internal pages link popularity is becoming the influential factor, not simply your home page. Your root domain can enjoy a great link popularity and Google PageRank, but your site won't reap the entire benefit unless your internal pages have links pointing to them too.

Internal linking contributes highly to your sites total link popularity thus search positioning especially on Google. Getting external links pointing to your internal pages has become a more determining search position factor than before.

Google's Webmaster Tools provides a good estimate of your website's link popularity both to the root and internally. You can see how well your site is externally links as well as interlinked with itself.

Finding places to link into your internal pages can be a challenge. Providing your visitors with information they are looking for and interesting content is a link building strategy itself. By using the correct avenues, internal link popularity is a great way to build search visibility, traffic and overall search positioning.

Labels: Link Building, Organic SEO

Yahoo introduced a robots-nocontent tag on the Yahoo! Search Blog. The new robots-nocontent tag allows you to note sections of a page, such as navigation, headers, boilerplate, legal disclaimers, etc. that you want Yahoo! to ignore. This allows the unique content to become the main focus of the page.

When Yahoo! comes to visit the page, it will not acknowledge the content/code within the robots-nocontent tags as useful information for finding the page for search results. Now, my concern is if someone places their navigation within this tag; isn't the navigation valuable information when it comes to finding a page? Doesn't your internal link structure play a role in your search results as well as anchor text used within the navigation links?

I caution those who choose the new robots-nocontent tag to use it wisely. The new tag can be a useful tool. Just be sure to put long consideration and thought into the decision before choosing to use the robots-nocontent tag on a section of your pages.

Labels: Organic SEO