Aaron Shear wrote an excellent blog post on the expected changes to Google’s ranking algorithm. If I were to paraphrase the story, the essential take-home message is this:

The prevalence of Google Analytics allows them to measure value of a site based on actual user behavior, instead of second degree measures such as linking or traffic. We’re going to use those measures as much as possible to identify relevance and ranking.

There are endless questions about how exactly this will be measured (is it within a sector or across all sites? How about improvements? Do site facelifts get noticed easily? etc.), but at the end of the day Google is challenging websites to embrace the entire constellation of website fundamentals, not just links or words.

This is fine as far as we’re concerned; basically we as a company view internet marketing at a strategic level: we help companies develop internet marketing strategies whose core online face is targeted, visible websites that are useful for visitors. Why? Because sites like that work to grow business.

So we’re glad Google got here. They are basically arguing that a site’s relevance is a combination of market analysis, visibility strategies, and usability (and usability. AND some more usability. Really, usability is IMPORTANT).

What this change does do is change our emphasis. Historically we have recommended Usability as a way to optimize a site that is already getting a pretty healthy head of steam from traditional SEO strategies. Now, we may start at the end-user experience for sites that are already nominally visible in order to grow their traffic through links and user experience statistics.

One challenge here is that many SEO companies, committed to certain strategies, may draw the wrong conclusions. For example, Aaron asserts in this article that this new model means people should focus on Blogs, social bookmarking sites, and Facebook. Maybe. But aggressive link building to a site that doesn’t hold a viewer’s interest will not mean much in this new universe. The question is whether or not content is working for your site. Even Aaron’s recommendation that a site create traffic that is RSS-worthy is just another kind of link-building strategy that is content-agnostic.

Not all sites are going to need to generate daily content, however. Those sites should focus on a useful, usable experience that maximizes the enjoyment and value to the user. This will provide Google with lots of data to measure site “satisfaction”. For those sites that are lucky enough to be properly aligned with daily content, creating blog- or RSS-worthy content is a great strategy as well.

Regardless of what happens next, Pure Visibility’s emphasis on the fundamentals of a positive internet experience will be useful to anyone trying to keep up with the shifting tides of ranking algorithms.