WVO is taking over SEO Part 3

Make your visitor happy and your search engine ranking position will follow.

If we follow on Google quest to ever provide better and better search results, which are results of high relevancy and high quality, we realize that there’re some difficulties to overcome.

How can search engines define relevancy and quality in a manner as accurate as possible?

Relevancy means that the search results should display sites or pages that provide content similar to what the person typed in the search box. The whole issue gave birth to the keywords and their history evolution as we talked about in part 1.

Realizing than Google couldn’t base its results in the sole “word” of the site owner, another way to increase the relevancy of a page was giving birth to what we call off-page SEO. Truly, what another person (or site) would have to say about one page should be given more value that what the person itself said…

Although all those methods explained in part 1 and part 2 did help Google a lot to provide better search results, an ultimate truth remains undeniable:

As long as people can influence the SERP by their SEO actions more than by true organic popular decision, the results will never be as relevant or of as high quality as they should or could be.

If you follow closely the modification Google made to its algorithms in this regard, we can tell more and more that it’s “destroying” SEO tools more and more pushing focus on “natural” selection.

Just having tons of pages no longer work, nor having them stuffed with keywords. Even basic concepts such as “white hat” optimization may now get you penalized for over-optimization… We are now talking about only a powerful title with your keyword in it, maybe a header and that’s it!

For the rest, you would have to write a quality content page of about 500 words. This page should be written in a natural way, no longer trying to stuff or repeat keywords in it. It is no longer the value of one keyword, no longer of one sentence, no longer of one content, no longer of one site, but truly now of whole connecting network.

Google wants to hear more and more about people voice. How did it used to do that? By checking your backlinks. Yes, those should be organic too, and Google is on a hunt against those artificial links.

Paid links will get banned, you’ll lose points from link exchanges, etc… the name of the game is all about people linking to you on their own will…

There comes another consideration factor: traffic.

I owe to believe that traffic and its nature will take a dominant place in the evolution of SEO towards WVO. More than links, more than any of the SEO, how many people come to your site again and again will be one of the most relevant factors of page quality and relevancy.

Now don’t get me wrong! The same filters will apply to these traffic, from where does it come from, and how often. Rests assure that “artificial” traffic will not count in the equation.
All those modifications from Google force us to produce higher and higher quality content, not for the search engines, but truly for the visitors.

Those new rules make the SERP game much more difficult to play. But I must admit that it will help to have Google filled with high quality pages.

Understanding this evolution that force us to focus more and more on the visitor rather than the “green bar” could benefit us all.

* As a search engine user, the results that would be returned to me would be of higher quality.
* This highly filters spammers.
* Who need to see 10 affiliate link pages as relevant results?

Of course, some SEO expert will argue (justifiably) that not only they may lose their jobs… but also that their websites will be negatively affected.

To those people my answer is simple: No.

Search Engine Optimization may no longer exist by being replaced with Web Visitor Optimization, but the work of a SEO expert is not limited to meta tags. First and foremost, the right selection of keywords, and page title will exist forever, understand the site structure, convenient navigation and others are all points that assures the SEO expert that he’ll still be needed.

Furthermore, anyone who has good SERP already (unless if he is a practitioner of black hat techniques), should have acquired it by doing the right things, that is:

* Good Keywords selection.
* High quality content.
* Authority referrals.
* Regular source of traffic.

Therefore, none of the above is in contradiction with the Web Visitor Optimization evolving rules and thus the sites should not be affected, on the contrary their value may even be enhanced.

I hope this set of posts have being helpful to you, and gave you a clearer insight of what I believe we are heading to.

If you have any question, don’t hesitate to ask, I’m here to help!