Click Popularity

Click popularity is a measure of how often your link in search results is clicked. In some search engines, the more often your link is clicked, the higher your site ranks in the search results. Thus, in popularity-driven search engines, you can search on your keyword terms, then go through the search results clicking on every link within the results that links to your site. Over time this will improve your position in these search engines.

The more savvy search engines keep track of how much time you spent at a given link, this is referred to as popularity stickiness. If you click on the first link in the search results, then back up and choose another link immediately, the search engine assumes you did not like the first result very much.

This explains why you were asked to NOT return to the search engine when we did the search for "Webmaster Certification" earlier in the course. A good strategy for you is to set your browser's home page to the search engine you would like to target, and each time you open your browser you search on your keywords, click on your link, then leave that search engine alone for a while (the exact delay time is unknown).

One of the biggest oversights in the search engine placement wars is focusing all your energy on one really good search term. You need to target multiple keyword terms, ones that have proven to be good search terms relative to the people doing the searching. WebYoda made this mistake early on as we did not focus on the search term "Web Design Training" as much as we should have. However, with your help in the next exercise, you can help correct this oversight.

It is often valuable to visit the competition's Web site. Remember that if you click on their links, you are improving their popularity as well. Instead, manually type the URL for the competition Web site into your browser location bar. This will get you to their site without giving them click popularity credit.

Source: Webyoda