Carl Galletti’s Internet Marketing Super Conference 9 got underway this morning in Vegas. Colin McDougall kicked things off with a talk on “Visitor Enhanced Optimization” – a term he coined as the different approach to SEO (search engine optimization).
McDougall is the author of the VEO Report which details how you get better rankings and more traffic by focusing first on your visitors as a [tag-tec]search engine optimization[/tag-tec] tactic.
This approach is something we have fully adopted at Authority Site Center and we actively teach quality content strategies to our clients as a means of driving rankings higher and to get voluntary links from other sites which also send good traffic.
In a comment on an earlier post I remember someone saying “Google can’t tell if content is quality or not.” Actually they can, but not from a robot point of view. Google watches what happens on your site. They watch to see how fast someone comes back to them after clicking on your link in their rankings.
If someone “bounces” back to them mere seconds after they clicked on your link at Google, they keep a tally of this. If you don’t believe me, sign up for a webmaster tools account at Google, submit your sitemap, and watch as Google shows you all kinds of statistics such as “bounce rate.”
Google has a lot of ways to track whether targeted visitors find your content to be high or low quality like this. Therefore, Google does know whether your content is good or not. Not algorithmically, but by watching what real people do on your site.
Colin has a history with Matt Cutts, Google’s most public representative on the web, and in so many words was told by Cutts that Google is going more and more in the direction of visitor enhanced optimization. That was awhile ago, and now we have results that confirm beyond the shadow of a doubt that this is true.
If you’d like to read up on this topic and get insight into what a major component of authority site building consists of, I can’t recommend the VEO Report more highly.
I will be speaking tomorrow after lunch on authority site building and targeted traffic strategies using Web 2.0 promotion.