Yahoo invented TrustRank, but that is mostly to keep spammer pages from getting search engine listings than it is about a page’s importance or how relative the page is to particular search terms.
Users are going to be the biggest factor in how you rank in the search engines at some point. As Yahoo and Google get more sophisticated, user information is going to become much more important to your rankings.
Google Page Rank is all but ignored by most people in the SEO business now. Page rank changes daily, yet google only updates the google toolbar every 3 months or so and even then the data is just what your page rank WAS on a specific day about 3 months ago.
So the page rank you see in the google toolbar is not really much of an indicator of the importance of a page. It really doesn’t help us at all. I don’t make any changes based on what the toolbar page rank is.
Yahoo wants to improve on how page rank works. This is from WebProNews.com
What Yahoo plans to do:
Measure link weight – influenced by the frequency with which users follow a link
Note when links are ignored and users leave (teleport) to another page of their choosing
Calculate the probability that a user stops and reads a webpage rather than views it and moves on.
Incorporate user data into the algorithm – “User Sensitive PageRank could reflect “the navigational behavior of the user population with regard to documents, pages, sites, and domains visited, and links selected.”
Personalize PageRank based on demographic information – age, gender, income, user location)
Emphasize recent information
Weigh anchor text more heavily – the patent filing calls anchor text “one of the most useful features used in ranking retrieved Web search results”
You can bet Google is working on the same things. What this tells us is that users are soon going to have a lot more to do with how your website ranks than ever before. User behavior on your webpages will determine how well you do. I think this trend is a great advancement and look forward to it.
That means you need good original content for your website that does more than have your keywords in it. Your content will need to engage the reader so they stay on pages longer if you want the rank of that page to go up.
Your linking strategy or navigation is going to have to be done well if you want your webpages to rank higher. That includes using anchor text properly.
We have always evaluated user behavior as part of the way we write webpages and how we design navigation. You have to guide the user to get them to do what you want them to, to get them to go where you want them to go.
You have to identify the various types of people that might come to your website and then divide them up according to their reasons for coming there, then send each group to the page that can close them on the sale.
To get great original content that closes sales written for you, call 786-317-8774, or click here to read more about our approach to writing good original content.
