Personalization And The Death Of SEO as we know it - Part 3

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In Parts 1 and 2 Dave Davies investigated the recent push towards personalised search results

Here Dave Davies' important article concludes:

You'll also want to engage in traditional link building efforts from regionally specific resources such as city-specific business directories, and related businesses in the area. There have been many great articles written on link building and there is certainly not space here to do it justice.

The patterns of similar searchers
When you know what searchers of specific criteria (such as search phrase) do when they enter your site you need to let the engines themselves know that these searchers like what they see (assuming you've already dealt with the behavior points noted above). You need to associate your site with specific communities that you know your visitors are likely to be a part of. You also need to try to get your site added to social bookmarking sites by people who are likely to have common bookmarks with others who may search your targeted phrases or related phrases.

Basically you want to make sure that any connection you can help make between your site, your visitors, and other potential visitors with similar interests or patterns as your past/present visitors is established. This can be done by asking visitors to bookmark you on social bookmarking site by providing links to some of the popular bookmarking sites such as Google Bookmarks and del.icio.us. This will help make bridges between your site and others by people with similar interests. Getting links on industry-specific authority sites is another useful way to tie your site to other quality resources in your industry. To illustrate how Google would view this: if authority site A links to related sites B and C and site D is not linked to by site A Google can assume that if a visitor likes site B then they are more likely to also like site C than the unassociated random site D not linked to by the authority site A.

The value of a visitor
So how to you get visitors that can positively affect the results to visit your site? While there is no definitive answer to this question there are a couple actions you can take to hedge your bets. The first is sheer numbers. Not necessarily the most scientific of answers but effective nonetheless. If you have 1000 visitors to your site your odds that you have visitors who have a high degree of PageRank assigned to them are much higher than if your site only receives 50 visitors. Ranking for multiple phrases and pulling in traffic from social bookmarking sites and authority communities are great ways to help increase your visitor numbers from people interested in the topic of your site.

Another way to attract high PageRank users to your site requires thinking like a high PageRank user. What type of person would visit related websites and view multiple pages and/or spend reasonable amounts of time on those sites? What are they looking for? How do they surf? What other sites do they visit? If you can get an understanding of how they surf the web and what they do on websites you'll get a feel for what you need to do in regards to site structure and keyword targeting to get them and keep them on your site.

What Does All Of This Mean?
To understand what this all means we need only reflect back on the title: SEO as we know it is dead. SEO's are going to need to develop new measurements for their campaigns that reside outside of the direct ranking-reports of old. New strategies to tie sites together and ensure that websites are included in communities and that visitors react favorably to them are going to become increasingly important.

What this means to the website owners is that the workload on your SEO provider (or on you if you're a do-it-yourselfer) is about to go up and like all things, so too is the cost. On the other side of the coin, you're about to get traffic from new sources and your site, by necessity, will be more visitor friendly so your conversions will go up. So while the workload and cost may increase, so too will the ROI.

In short, while the lives of SEO's are once again going the to get a little more difficult, the search engines will benefit, their visitors will benefit, website owners will benefit and so in the end, this is good for all of us.

About the Author
Dave Davies is the CEO of Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning, Inc. He writes with 6 years of experience in search engine optimization, link building and reacting to algorithm additions and updates. You can keep yourself updated on the latest goings-on in the SEO and search engine world on Beanstalk?s blog or, of course, on our site here