[Posted by Kristin Hambelton
Senior Director of Marketing, Neolane, Inc.]

In the “old” days, search engine optimization, or SEO, was all about figuring out which keywords to use and implementing them comprehensively on your website. There were far fewer web pages in existence at the time, so there was less competition. The strategic placement of keywords in title tags, page headings and body copy was often enough to move a website from page 5 to page 1 in the rankings over the space of a few months.

In time, the number of web pages grew exponentially, to some extent because so much content was being written simply for the sake of placing more keywords in Google’s path. Keyword placement was still necessary, but no longer sufficient to put a site at the top of the search results.

Soon, links became the new currency of the realm as people recognized, quite rightly, that the search engines could and did evaluate the importance of a website by the quality and quantity of links that pointed to it. People began scrambling for links, first with bulk email solicitations, then with article placements and more recently by using (and abusing) social media websites. Links are still a key element in determining a website’s rank. However, as all of the easier sources of links became cluttered, those efforts bore fewer and fewer benefits.

How do the search engines today decide which sites should come out on top? The answer is that in addition to content and links, they also look increasingly at traffic and stickiness. If a site gets lots of visitors, especially returning visitors, and if those visitors stay around for a while and look at multiple pages on the site, the search engines conclude that it must be a great site and they reward it with more prominent search results. This brings more visitors to the site; truly, a virtuous circle.

The most widely used search engine today is, of course, Google. Google also has the best mechanisms in place to track website visitors and engagement in order to mine that data for determining search engine rankings. How?

• Google Analytics – Google’s popular, free web analytics tool is installed on around 57% of the 10,000 most popular websites, according to Wikipedia.
• Chrome – Google’s browser sends data back to Google, tracking where its users visit and how long they stay.
• Google Toolbar – installed in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox (interestingly, not available in Apple’s Safari) sends similar data to Google.

So how can marketing automation software help you increase your website’s search engine rankings?

Marketing automation software can help bring more traffic to your site, especially returning visitors. This can be achieved through personalization and segmentation, which helps you put those visitors in front of content that’s specifically targeted to match their interest, so they’ll stick around. And that causes the search engines to like your site even more.

Neolane’s marketing automation solution helps increase the traffic and stickiness of your site via personalization and segmentation of outbound messages via multiple channels, including email, direct mail and mobile. Targeting the right content to the right audience with marketing automation therefore increases the amount of time visitors are likely to stay on the site, reducing the bounce rate (visitors that leave after viewing one page). Google favors sites with lower bounce rates than their peers because those sites tend to have content that engages visitors and therefore makes Google‘s search results more relevant to searchers. Serving the searching public is Google’s overarching goal, and they reward sites that help them achieve it with higher search engine rankings.