Today’s Wednesday Witty Wisdom comes from NMC Interactive Marketing Manager Matt Rideout. He wrote about the dramatic changes happening in Google Search. If you want to see more articles like this, subscribe to The NMC Report, our bi-weekly e-newsletter filled with great information on PR  and interactive marketing from Nancy Marshall Communications.

A few years ago it didn’t matter too much if your website’s HTML code was a little dated or if your copy was a little generic. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) firms were ready and willing to work their magic and boost your rankings by painstakingly building inbound links, stuffing keywords into your content and perhaps even performing some other questionable SEO practices.

There was an inherent problem with the old ways—websites which had better SEO ranked better than the websites with better content. Google has been continuously working to refine its search engine algorithm and the latest update to it is called Panda. The Panda update is designed to improve the quality of its search engine results, and to defeat the efforts of search engine gamers, or people that “game” the search engine system to boost rankings artificially.

Chrome has been one of Google’s most useful tools in refining its search algorithm. In the old days, Google could really only try and monitor your behavior to and from their search results page using cookies and IP address tracking. With the introduction of Google Toolbar, they got to take a better peek at people’s behavior across more of the internet.

The introduction of several new technologies very recently has led to enormous changes:

• The introduction of Google’s web browser “Chrome” (which now has an almost 30% share of the browser usage pool) with anonymous data usage tracking (not enabled by default however).
• The rapid adoption of Google accounts with “web history and anonymous data tracking” enabled.
• The new addition of personalized search results based on what friends and family suggest.
• Personal results based on past web history.

These new technologies have given Google a much better idea of how people are behaving with the internet and they’re now much more capable of creating search engine algorithms that rank pages based on how people might rank them themselves.

Now when Google looks at a website, several more factors are taken into consideration. How is the content written? Is it generic or are there jokes and anecdotes to keep readers attention? How long do people spend reading the content? Are there a lot of images? How are people interacting with the site itself? Are people finding the information they are looking for? If two websites are conceptually equal in content, but different in design and aesthetics, which do people like better?

In addition, just for you, Google will check to see if your friends and family have recommended any sites related to your search term, and also assess your past web history and behavior to see which results should show up first. (Ever notice that a website’s search engine ranking might change based on whether or not you are logged into your Google account?)

This all boils down to my ultimate point: you can (and should) waste less money paying SEO firms to try and “game the system” and spend more money improving your website’s look and feel and providing it with high quality and fresh content. Start paying attention to how people are using your website with Google’s Analytics tool. If you can make changes to improve your visitor behavior stats (time on site, pages per visit, bounce rate, etc…), those same changes should now directly translate to an uptick in your search engine rankings. Your content and design are now more important than ever.

Have you been tracking your search engine rankings and traffic from search engines lately? With the latest Google update, have you noticed a change? Many websites which employ old style SEO tactics have seen significant drops in their rankings and traffic. Sites with higher quality content have seen their rankings improve and traffic increase. What has happened to your site?

See this video for a visual introduction to Google’s latest update, code named “Panda.”