If you make a living online or if you are planning on making a living online watching and understanding the search engines is a very important part of being able to do so.
At one time links were the big talk of the Internet, however it appears as we move closer to a new year, search engines are incorporating more factors into their ranking algorithm, and one of these is user behavior.

Search engine started out looking at content but it got extremely abused.

Then the search engine started looking at links as an indicator of what was important. It worked and continues to work but links are slowly becoming a less trustworthy indicator due to the massive abuse.

So what’s next?

Bounce rates, page views, brand searches and other indicators can now be a deciding factor in taking the top spot. There are several webmasters reporting an increase in traffic has caused their websites to begin to rank better for certain search terms.

Microsoft has made clear to search communities that they are considering using behavioral data as an important indicator of quality and relevance with the release of browse rank.

The more visitors to a page and the longer a user stays on the page would appear to affect the ranking of the site.

It would appear that when ranking in the top of the search engines you have your own page factors, your link’s, Google raters and behavioral data.
As the Internet changes one of the new factors in ranking in the search engines is keeping users on your site.

“Douglas Quenqua reports in the NY Times that according to a 2008 survey only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days meaning that “95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.” Richard Jalichandra, chief executive of Technorati, said that at any given time there are 7 million to 10 million active blogs on the Internet, but it’s probably between 50,000 and 100,000 blogs that are generating most of the page views.

“There’s a joke within the blogging community that most blogs have an audience of one.” Many people who think blogging is a fast path to financial independence also find themselves discouraged. “I did some Craigslist postings to advertise it, and I very quickly got an audience of about 50,000 viewers a month,” says Matt Goodman, an advertising executive in Atlanta who had no trouble attracting an audience to his site, Things My Dog Ate, leading to some small advertising deals. “I think I made about $20 from readers clicking on the ads.”

Since most bloggers don’t update their blogs, the ones that do get more attention from Google.

The problem is that most people lack the understanding of how to get the most out of their blogs and give up the second they don’t make any type of an income. I’ve been making good money with my blogs for the last three years however, mine are created to convert a certain product and the content is below the call to action for that product.

I’ve done a good bit of testing and have found that building a blog and loading it down with ads doesn’t work. However, creating a blog like a website with a call to action does.

Blogs, like websites, are a great way to make money but to make money with them they need to look and feel more like a websites.