Place your website in the first three places in Google results

Getting ranked in Google’s search engine result pages (SERPs) is a zero sum game. If you can capture one of the top three spots, or at least page 1, your website is pretty much guaranteed to get a lot of visitors. If it’s on any other page, most potential customers will never find it.

Effects of Google Algorithm Updates

Just when most webmasters became aware of search engine optimization (SEO), Google changed the way it ranked pages. In August 2011, it released the Panda search engine algorithm update. The biggest difference was that Google started to put much less emphasis on backlinks and gave more weight to social approval signals. This change continued when the Penguin update was released in April 2012.

Google’s search engine algorithm was originally designed before the explosion in popularity of social media. In these seemingly prehistoric days, which were actually less than a decade ago, web users had little opportunity to immediately respond to the content they were reading. As a result, a website’s ranking was primarily based on the number of high-quality backlinks it had.

Signs of Social Approval

Penguin and Panda changed all that. Now, the ranking of a site is mainly determined by Internet users who can “vote” on the usefulness and quality of a site by pressing the “Like” button on Facebook, retweeting it, using the “+1” button on Google+ .

Google uses these social approval signals to determine the value of a web page faster and more accurately. As a result, your search engine’s algorithm relies more on social media-based indicators than backlinks to determine a site’s page rank.

So if you want your page to rank highly, you need to make it easy for people to give you social thumbs up. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) should focus on encouraging people on social media to link to and approve of your pages, rather than spending most of their time building backlinks, which are still useful but no longer are of paramount importance.

Use of LSI keywords

While including the optimal number of keywords related to your niche (2-4 percent) is still vitally important to improve your Google rankings, the Penguin version now also looks for Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords, a fancy term that basically means “synonyms”.

Google now gives preference to web pages that flow more organically, so pages that are optimally saturated with keyword synonyms are preferred over pages that contain the same keyword repeated over and over again.

Visitor behavior page

Another critical change is the value that Google’s search engine now pays attention to the behavior of your page visitors once they get there. In addition to looking at things like how long the average visitor stays on your page and how often they return, the post-Penguin search engine also looks at things like the number of clicks, browsing pattern and bounce rate, or how many visitors make click to withdraw. from your page after only a second or two, an indicator of a low-quality page.

If visitors don’t find what they’re looking for when they land on your site, find your content boring, uninteresting, or find your content the same as they can find anywhere else, your bounce rate will increase. Another thing that can increase your bounce rate is when pages have auto-launching audio or video. This tends to cause visitors to bounce right away, especially if they are viewing the page at work.

Decreased ‘bounce rate’

To reduce your bounce rate, you want to make it easier for high-target visitors to find your page and provide high-value content once they get there. These SEM techniques will keep your visitors engaged for longer by improving how Google ranks your page.

Another aspect to take into account are the keywords that are attracting visitors to your page: Are they the most appropriate? Otherwise, users who come in and don’t find what they’re looking for are likely to leave quickly, negatively impacting your SERP rank.

Finally, design your page by including clearly defined links within it to other pages within your site so that visitors can easily navigate to the specific information they want. This helps reduce page bounce and keep visitors on your pages longer, which improves rankings.