SEO Tip: Click-throughs

I've come to my senses. No, I don't see any reason to fill the net with junk. I just understand that there is a lot of junk out there and a lot of NON-junk out there, and that no matter how much work you put into a web page, your page is just one little speck in a vast sea.

I keep thinking of that old Seuss book Horton Hears a Who. "We are here! We are here!"

So I've been learning how to make breadcrumb trails to my (hopefully) good content. I've posted all I've learned about SEO so far on a Squidoo lens called How To Get Your Lens Found. Some of that is Squidoo-specific, but a lot can be adapted for any web page.

Here's my newest "D'oh, why didn't I think of this before?" lesson.

If people back out of your web page via the back button, it probably means they didn't find what they were looking for, and Google and other search engines lower your pagerank accordingly. If people leave your page by clicking through a link on your page -- they've gotta leave sooner or later -- that implies that they found something worth checking out on your page, and your pagerank goes up a titch.

I'm sure each click-through doesn't make much of a difference, but cumulatively, they will.

So, how to capitalize on this?

Use a tool like Squidoo's Traffic Stats to examine the search phrases sending people to your web page. But DON'T try to anticipate and answer their every need on that web page, like I used to. Make a separate FAQ page addressing popular queries, and put a link at the top saying, "Need a quick answer on X, Y, Z? Check our FAQ!"

That way, you've created a tempting click-through based on what past users tend to look for, but it doesn't send them offsite.