Engage your website visitors

Some interesting things are happening on the SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) front, especially with Google and how they approach the organic ranking of websites.

2009 is going to see some shifting in how Google works. I don’t think it will be a major ‘flip the switch’ moment, but from what I’ve learned, Google is striving to improve their search results even more.

The ‘voting on search results’ that I recently discussed forms part of Universal Search. Universal Search brings about customised search results, based on many factors. In essence Google tracks what you’ve searched for historically (even when you’re not logged into Google) and this, including your geographic location will ensure biased search results.

If you’ve got a history for example of having an interest in travelling, your search results might serve up more travel flavoured results. What this means is that the user gets more results in line with their interests and historical search trends, therefore Google is serving their needs better.

In 2009 it will also be important to engage your website visitors better. It will be extremely important to track your analytics properly and ensure that you engage the visitor on multiple fronts, like video, flash, audio, images and written text. The reasoning behind this is that Google’s spiders (the little bots that index content from websites) will continually improve on extracting content from these mediums and it might give a slight competitive advantage.

If you engage your visitors better and give them more of what they want, they stay on your site longer, which also means your bounce rates (the percentage of visitors that arrive and leave immediately) will be reduced. All of this is part of the increased number of variables that determine rank for web pages in Google. It’s said that this figure is now hovering around the 200 variable mark. This means there are 200 different factors that come into play in how well your website will rank.

For SEO’s, this will mean some adjustment in the way we approach search engine optimisation. Very importantly though, there is no exact recipe (apart from the obvious standard compliance tweaks) to achieve perfect results for each client. It will be more important to focus on conversion and how well you can get your website traffic to convert (I’ve been preaching this for years!).

If Google sees that your website is converting well, it will probably influence your ranking positively as your website is able to provide visitors with solutions to their search queries. How they measure whether conversion takes place (if you haven’t got Analytics with conversion metrics installed) is still a mystery, but it will be interesting to note.

My suggestion for companies busy looking at their online strategies would be to look into going multimedia (where applicable) and to offer the best possible user experience. It’s not just about trying to get the most possible traffic! This doesn’t mean that you should put ‘Flash all over your website’ or ‘blinking text’ as was the craze when that specific technology first came out, but rather experimenting with all your options and closely monitoring results through your analytics to see what brings about the most quality conversions.