Google’s Ranking Factors Are Geared Towards Human Interest

SEO is on many people’s minds a lot of the time, and as Google continues to evolve, so do website owners and SEO consultants in order to keep up with the ever changing SEO environment. We have written a lot of posts about Google’s Panda and Penguin updates, and if you follow the SEO world you would have probably heard of them. The Panda and Penguin updates are Google’s changes to its search algorithm to help display more relevant results, penalise websites with unnatural links and poor, low quality content.

With the explosion of Social Media and locally targeted search results Google is geared towards including human interest as a ranking factor in its search algorithm. So how can you boost your search engine rankings and increase the amount of natural backlinks in a human interest driven Google results environment? Well, this may come as no surprise to you, but the answer is content. Having a website full of engaging, quality content is the key to attracting and engaging your users’ interest.

Content Is King, But How Do You Know If It Is Good Enough?

Of course, you could just set upon writing loads of content for your site but how do you know that it is good enough? Below are steps that could potentially help you better understand the engaging quality of your content.

• Social Media – Are people sharing or posting about your content to others? If it is high quality, people will share and talk about it.
• Backlinks – If other websites and pages are naturally linking to your content, then that is a good sign that it is considered to be of value.
• Bounce Rate – If people are landing on your content and leaving straight away, then that is a good sign that your content is of little use to those visitors or is low quality.

Listen To What Google Tells You

There are still many people using black hat techniques to try and beat Google. When in reality, the real way to succeed in SEO is to listen to what Google is saying. Google has always emphasised the importance of quality, engaging content and now this is more important than ever. In order to improve the quality and human interest in your content, you should be measuring social signals surrounding your content (are people posting and talking about it), measure traffic on your web pages (using tools such as Google Analytics), and measure quantity and quality of comments. Together this can greatly increase the chances of your website ranking well in the SERPs.

Whether you are a small website targeting local services or a big website working on a large SEO strategy, creating quality, engaging content is essential in attracting and retaining human interest. Google is getting smarter every day and will continue to get better at determining what is quality content and what is poor, artificial or scraped content. Google wants the quality of your content to be recognised and shared naturally, because of human interest in what you are creating.

Related Posts from SEO

How Does Google’s Mobile Friendly Update Affect Search Results?

Good Ways to Get Links and Social Shares

How to use Social Bookmarking Websites for your Business

How Social Media Could Improve Search Engine Rankings