Beyond Link Building - What's Next

Link building strategies have been the most effective way to optimize a websites search engine rankings. This has been especially true with Google's search engine algorithm.

But link building strategies are losing their importance. They will soon be superseded by a much better indicator of how a site should truly rank in the search engines. This indicator is no less than the most sophisticated one which attempts to calculate how actual visitors truly value a website. The site visitors will be the voters who decide the true credibility of the site for any given keywords.

This will be measured by how much time they spend on the site, whether they clickthrough to other sections of the site and if they like it enough to want to come back for a return visit by placing this site in their bookmarks or feed readers.

This is truly novel stuff for the science of search engine algorithms and it's great news for all of us who want to find the best information on the first page of our search.

This new capability is coming about via new tools such as the Google Toolbar and Google Analytics. These will be the key search engine algorithm formula tools in the near future.

Links are dead - long live links! is the best write-up I've seen about the changes brewing now at the major search engines. Whereas links were once king, now it is a user activity, christened as 'clickstream' by the author.

If you have a website and want to maximize your search rankings based on these new criteria, check out their informative article at Platinax about this.