Content-Based Ranking

SEO has changed drastically over the past few years. 10 years ago you could get your website ranked on the first page of Yahoo! simply by optimizing your meta tags, nowadays meta tags count for nothing. Is it possible that something we regard just as highly today, such as anchor text, might also count for nothing in 10 years time?

In this article I will explore a few of the possible methods that search engines might use in the future, based on website content and using visitor patterns to your website to assess your
website’s usefulness.

Monitoring The Number Of People Viewing The Websites

A shop is similar to a website in many respects; it must attract visitors to browse it’s products, it must provide customers with information about the products it sells, and it must retain customers to make them come back. So, how can we determine how popular a particular shop is? The two main factors are: -

- The number of shoppers that walk through the doors.
- How many people are in the shop at any given time.

The same concepts that determine how popular a shop is can also be applied to a website. You’ll notice that monitoring how many people walk through the shop doors, and how many people are in the shop at the same time are the best ways of determining how popular a particular shop is, so it seems only logical that the same practice could be applied to a website.

Using the Google toolbar it could be possible to track how many times a website is visited and how many people are viewing that website at any given time, giving a good indication of how popular that website is.

Monitoring The Number of Returning Visitors

If a person returns to a website time and time again then there must be a reason for it: the website is providing useful up-to-date information that keeps them coming back. This is obviously a quality that all websites would like, and one that should be synonymous with a
popular website. Again, it seems only logical that this is, or could be used as a ranking factor. Again, the google toolbar could be used to keep track of which websites you visit, and how many times you return to that website.

Monitoring the Length of Visit

If a website is providing lots of useful, unique information then chances are you’ll spend quite a lot of time browsing the site and looking at or reading what information it has. The longer you spend on a particular website, the more popular and useful it could be deemed to be.

More Content-Based Weighting

My previous three suggestions have all been based around one central concept: content. It’s the content of the website that will hold the browser’s attention that keeps them logged onto your site so that at any one time you could have thousands of visitors, it’s content that makes them return to your website time-and-time again, and it’s content that make the visitors stay on your web site for an extended period of time.

Let’s assume you search for “stock market crash 1929”, and you have the choice between two websites, you click on the first website which has only one paragraph on the stock market crash. Feeling you need more information you try the second website. The second website provides reams of information, including stock graphs, information on what lead to the crash, what happened after the crash, and how it recovered. Now, which website would provide the best information for the searchers? You guessed it, the second one, so wouldn’t it make sense that the website that I spend more time viewing would be given a better search engine ranking for the term “stock market crash 1929”? After all, search engines want to serve websites that provide the best solution for what they are searching for.

Overview

The trouble with these suggestions is there is no way of proving that adding more content to your website will actually improve your search engine rankings. But one thing can definitely be said, if you provide more useful
content for your visitors then not only will they keep returning to your website, but also word of mouth will spread about the quality of the information on your site, so as a result your website will naturally begin to climb the search engine results through the increase in links to your website. So even if you don’t get a direct increase in search engine results, you will definitely benefit from the indirect results.