What is Personal Search & How Does it Affect Your SEO

What the heck is personal search anyway?

Google introduced the concept of personal search a few years back but it’s not been until recently that it’s received a lot of buzz in the recruiting industry. Yahoo and MSN (Windows Live) have followed suit and also have personal search capabilities.

Once you're logged into a search engine account, like Google Gmail, your search engine results are modified based on your past history of searching, your bookmarks and what’s on your personal homepage. This is another reason why rankings are an old school metric for evaluating success.

Example: 3 People Search for “Beatles”

• Searcher 1 – receives results geared towards “the band”
  


• Searcher 2 – receives results geared towards “the bug”
  


• Searcher 3 – received results geared towards “the car”

Personal Search is the search engines way of trying to deliver the most relevant results to you. You can tell whether or not you are receiving personalized search results because it will tell you in the upper right hand corner. Personalized search results only effective first page listings.

How will this affect your SEO Strategy?

For those that already concentrate on relevancy, creating search-engine-friendly sites and user-centered content, this won’t have much of an impact at all. For those that are not, you’ll really need to re-evaluate your SEO strategy. Understanding your target audience and user engagement are critical to attracting the attention of those that use personal search.

Ways to Optimize Your Site for Personal Search

The key is to ensure your site is “sticky” you want users to find your website relevant and stick around for a while. The longer a user is on your site the better. In addition to quality content (I can’t stress that enough) be sure to have features that engage your target audience.

• Blog
• RSS Buttons
• Bookmark or Favorite Button
• Video
• Social Network Components

At the end of the day as long as you keep “users” at the forefront of your SEO strategy, you can’t fail.