First page search rankings are no guarantee of success: here’s why
Studies have proven that the vast majority of people do not look at the second page of search engine results, so one of the goals of websites is to appear on the first page. Appearing on the first page gives businesses and sites the luxury of displaying their services, products, or content to people. But how do sites actually get to this prime location? They can focus on search engine optimization, or SEO. One would think that by strategically placing keywords on your website, so that you show up in search results, you could beat the search engine algorithm. However, the algorithm is smart enough to realize when sites are “keyword stuffing”, and this method can actually hurt the site’s rank. Instead, the rank is based on several different factors such as image tags, site structure and design, traffic behavior, and social signals.
So how can a site reach the first page? This article suggests that by focusing on what the site offers, instead of trying to outsmart the algorithm, keywords will “naturally pollinate the content”, thus “naturally optimizing in the process”. This is actually most beneficial to sites, because just because a site appears in the first few top results, it doesn’t mean that visitors will stay on the sites. It is better to have lower website traffic (low click through rates) with a high retention rate (people that purchase from the site and/or revisit the site) than high website traffic with next to none retention. In other words, the raw rank of a site isn’t as important as the quality of the rank and trying to appeal to the wrong audience is a waste of time and effort.
PageRank, Google’s first algorithm used for its search engine that we talked about in class, uses hyperlinks to rank sites. This article does not talk about specific algorithms, but there is a heavy focus on the notion of keywords and many other factors, indicating that algorithms have grown more complex than simply looking at links. However, the newer algorithms work in a similar manner by assessing the quality of the site and giving different weights based on different factors. Although this is not a perfect system, the search engine is still extremely useful and is constantly being improved.
Reference: http://memeburn.com/2015/10/first-page-search-rankings-are-no-guarantee-of-success-heres-why/