By You don’t have to go back many years to a time when SEO was all about link building. And with good reason.
The amount of links that you had coming to your site, and the quality of those links, had a strong connection with how well you ranked.
Because of that a huge amount of services and tools sprang up to get you ranking quickly. Tools that made backlinks for you, SEO companies whose entire business structure was built around creating these links rather than understanding SEO.
But this is no longer the case.
Whenever Google do an update you hear shouts of complaints from the people who have used these techniques to rank their websites.
Why?
Because the chances are that they’ll soon lose all their ranking for the most important keywords.
Although a lot of people are going to shout me down about this, I believe that this is a good thing.
The link building techniques that have been used in the past are essentially trying to cheat the system. They’re shortcuts to generating revenue from Google search engine traffic.
What we should be focusing on is giving our visitors a high quality experience.
After all… isn’t that exactly what Google is trying to do with their search algorithm!
Google wants to provide their traffic with exactly the same thing as you.
They want to provide people who are looking for “green cars” the best information on green cars.
It doesn’t matter what someone is searching for, Google’s primary goal in the results is to show the sites which have the best content and user experience at the top of the list.
It’s their job to filter out the millions of websites that have got nothing unique, of value or interest on and are simply there to try and make money out of people.
As I’ve said before in other posts on this blog. If you truly want to provide your readership with something to help them, then you’ll be able to find ways to monetize it.
If you start by just wanting to create a blog to make money then you should be looking at a different business structure.
A good blog is filled with content whose sole aim is to help and educate. If the sole aim of your blog is to make money then you need to find how you’re going to help people, what are you doing that is going to make their lives easier.
When you’ve done this you can focus on providing that and generating revenue should come as a natural progression.
So what is it that Google now want to see on your website for them to rank you highly?
It is looking more and more that Google are focusing on three main areas of user interaction with your site. These are:
1.Bounce Rate
The bounce rate is a percentage of the people that visit your site and then leave without going somewhere else.
In other words they click on a listing in Google and then hitting the back button to go back to the search results, it’s very likely that they didn’t find whatever it was that they were looking for.
If they go back to the search results and then click on another link, that increases the likelihood they didn’t find what they were looking for even more.
2. Click Through
The click through rate on a listing in Google’s search results is going to tell them how relevant it is in comparison to the search that was inputted.
If everyone is skipping over your listing in the search results for a particularly search, then it shows Google that your post isn’t what they’re looking for and the relevance for that search phrase will drop.
This makes it very important to have a good title and description on your posts. This information is, effectively, your advert for your post. It needs to be relevant for people who are searching for a range of phrases so they click on it if it shows in their Google Search.
3. Time On Site
Similar to the click-through, the time on site shows Google how relevant your content is to the person that searched for it.
If, on average, visitors are spending just a few seconds on the site after clicking a link in the Google search results then Google knows that the content is going to be less relevant than people who are averaging a few minutes and actually spending enough time to read what’s written there.
Ultimately, we know that…
Google want to provide the right answer to a search phrase first time, every time.
Of course this is never going to happen. But it is the goal they’re working towards with every improvement.
The best user experience for Google would be to provide their users with one link for each search they do that contains all the information they need.
What does this mean for us?
It means that our focus should be on providing high quality content and user experiences.
SEO isn’t rocket science. Of course, you can get really deep into the algorithms and how they work. You can certainly boost your SEO performance by using the right meta tags, keywords and descriptions.
But ultimately…
If you continually provide high quality content, share it and share relevant content from other sites you will start to see your site move up in the rankings and become a content hub for your niche that is unbeatable.
How do you see SEO changing in the future?
UPDATE:
We’ve just been told about this awesome blog post https://www.izideo.com/blog/list-sites-accepts-guest-posting/ this shows more than 1500 blogs which accept guest posts, and they’re all broken down into different categories. Pretty friggin awesome!
What do you think?