SEO by visitor behaviour

Fifteen years later and we’re all still pandering to Google’s definition of SEO.

1.     The more sites that link to your page, the higher its value.

2.     The more you can sneak a particular keyword into your content, the more the content will be valued by the person doing the keyword search.

The result, of course, is that SEO manipulation is now a massive business.

Well, enough already. Why aren't page rankings based, instead, on visitor behaviour?

Could it be any more simple? The more a visitor interacts with a webpage or website – whether it’s in terms of scrolling, mousing over it, copying bits of it, clicking through it and coming back to it – the more they’re getting out of it.

This is information that the search engines can easily acquire. And it would mean that good flash-based sites (and I’m not the only one who likes them), wouldn’t get penalised by the current rules of the game.

It would also mean that keyword tags would become useful again, not simply a spamming tool. So if you tagged ‘SEO, search engine optimisation, google page ranking, success, secrets, infallible, blah blah blah’ but your page is just clickbait spam and gets an average dwell time of half a second, the search engine will rate it accordingly and it’ll simply go to the back of the queue. But if it’s genuinely useful, the page ranking will be excellent.

So I just need a few million now to hire the relevant programmers, and another few million to short Google stock. Anyone?