Google and Page Rank

Google’s page rank system is virtually dead. Google is producing more sophisticated methods or ranking websites and are becoming better and better at weeding out dead sites. Sites that don’t offer fresh content, sites that don’t bring and retain visitors are going to suffer page rank. Google used to crawl sites by looking at the keywords in your website, finding other sites that linked to yours and ranking those sites as well in order to help determine the quality of your website. Now Google wants to see how others see your website.

Google is now going to be focusing on a deeper algorithm. It is no longer going to just track your hits each month but is going to take into account how long each visitor stays at your site. Say someone did a search and your site came up in the results. They click on your site and then quickly realize it’s not what they were looking for of they just don’t like your site and leave rather quickly. A person can bounce by:

• clicking on a link to another site
• typing in a new website
• closing the browser window
• remaining idle for too long, causing the analytics session to timeout
• hitting the ‘back’ button

Basically, Google wants to see that people like your site and want to stay there and look around.

How do you get people to stay on your site???

• Videos
  Record a video, upload it to YouTube, embed on your website. You want to try to keep your visitors around for a few minutes and have them check out other spots on your site while they are there.
• Downloadable forms
• Make clickable urls open in a new window, not in the same window
• Sidebar widgets to entice visitors to look around your site (maybe Featured Listings if you’re a Point2 member or real estate agent)
• Blogs

Be prepared to revamp your website and to really take a leap onto the social networking bandwagon if you haven’t already. It’s a great way to share your website with the world, gain traffic, and make friends. If you don’t have the time to blog, consider hiring a Virtual Assistant to help write your articles. Or, you could write them and your Virtual Assistant could post them all over the internet, driving traffic back to your site. Either way, now is the time to really consider getting involved before you lose your search engine placement to those who are.