Isn’t it always the way? It was the ‘popular’ kids that attracted the most friends in school, and it’s the popular people who get all the attention at parties. For some reason, in the human psyche, popularity breeds popularity.
This is true not just for people. It’s flowed over onto the internet as well. The search industry is just as interested in popularity as any fawning admirer at a nightclub. Any site owner who has spent months building a good link profile can attest to the influence that the appearance of popularity has on a site’s rankings. Unfortunately, appearance is no longer enough. A good website has to support the popularity indicated by their link profile by attracting a decent click-through rate from the SERPs.
How popularity is calculated
The SEO world has used links to manipulate the popularity factor in search engine algorithms for many years now. Sadly, the search engines are all-too aware of the flaws in the system. Companies have bought links, set up new sites to provide their own links, bribed others for links, and organised all sorts of ingenious schemes to get links. These types of links have been all but banned by the search engines, but their detection methods aren’t up to scratch. After spending years trying to shore up the loopholes in the calculation of popularity, the search engines seem to have moved on to a much easier system. They now measure your popularity by how popular you are, using their own statistics.
The main measure is how often your listing is selected when it appears in the search results. Of course, if you’re far down the list, you have less likelihood of being picked. If you’re up in the list, however, and still aren’t chosen, the search engines take this to mean that all of the tricks that got you that ranking were just that – tricks.
Using your position wisely
If failing to be clicked on can sink your ranking, then getting clicked on more frequently can boost it. Some site owners have made this logical leap and attempted to boost their ranking via manual clicks of their listings for their target keywords, but this approach, like most efforts to deceive Google, doesn’t work. You need to naturally make your listing more attractive to internet users.
The first thing you can do is improve your title tag. If you’ve been concentrating on keywords, it might be time to reshuffle to make the title more appealing to humans. It can be a good idea to seek the help of a consultant when it comes down to this delicate level of search engine optimisation manipulation, and you can talk to us at SEO Consult Australia. After your title, your description tag is the next thing to come under an internet user’s scrutiny, and rewriting this can also help your click-through rate immensely.
If your page already has a high click-through rate from the search engines, you’re sitting pretty. All you need to do is ensure that your competitors don’t topple you from your place.
