Obviously being in the business of Web Design and SEO I keep a close eye on my websites and my clients websites. Taking note of changes to the websites, changes in SERP’s and of course the almost redundant Pagerank. I thought I would share a few observations with you.

Over the festive period I noticed something that confirms that your website traffic affects your pagerank and in turn your position in search results. One of my clients website has jumped from 0/10 to 2/10, the content has remained pretty much the same for a while, no link building had been carried out (unless some organic ones have popped up). However the website (an ecommerce store) has enjoyed increased traffic on the lead up to and over the Christmas period. They are also ranking a lot better for many of their products now.

Also in the Autumn I started an Adwords campaign on one of my web design websites. This generated more traffic and in turn improved my search engine listings! I ended up on page one for my main key term, it has since disappeared. I can attribute this to no other reason apart from the increase in traffic (unless Google ranks sites that have adwords campaigns higher…I seriously doubt they would endanger their credability by doing this).

All this is a bit like money goes to money…..only in this case traffic goes to traffic. The more traffic you can obtain through Google the more traffic Google will inturn give you.

Obviously it will not be as purely simple as traffic, Im sure they calculate bounce rate, how many pages visitors open etc etc.

Whats the moral of the story? Well optimise your site as best you can try and get as much traffic as possible through every means and if you can afford it take out an adsense campaign. If Google sees an increased amount of traffic coming to you through them then your Pagerank may increase like my clients and keep an eye on your search engine position for your keyterms!