Search is not simply about keyword density and the number of links to a specific page, it is much more complex now. In our interview with Microsoft's Christi Olson and Fabrice Canal, on Live with Search Engine Land about What SEOs need to know about Bing Webmaster Guidelines, we spoke about how Bing ranks content and the importance of semantic and searcher intent. Fabrice Canal, Principal Program Manager at Bing, Microsoft, said "it's all about machine learning" when I asked him what is not a Bing ranking factor. "So this is all about kind of the magic of machine learning where obviously the engineers can go deep to understand exactly what is happening," he said. There is this feeling that when machine learning is running the search rankings or any model, that you cannot debug it.

One of the biggest mistakes made by business owners and native digital marketers is being too focused on vanity keywords and search volume as the indicator of SEO success. This article will focus on user intent, often referred to as "searcher intent", as the most valuable point of focus for SEO success, in any SEO campaign. Let's start off by explaining what searcher intent actually is… Searcher intent (also known as "user intent") is the motive a person has for carrying out a query through a search engine. Understanding and optimising for your customers' intent is critical for SEO. How we search for answers has evolved and changed over the years. And with that change, search engine algorithms have been adjusted to return the most relevant results. In the beginning, search engines returned results based on a pretty simplistic formula: They would look at basic factors such as the density of keywords matching the query and some more elusive factors like PageRank. SEO professionals and spammers took advantage of this with keyword stuffing, hiding text techniques and buying links. The era of black hat SEO, unfortunately, blossomed. It was, and will always be, in Google's best interest to become better at answering queries. SEO success used to be built on gaming search engines, but now SEO is about optimising for what the user is trying to accomplish. As it should be, we're no longer writing for robots and algorithms.

By making your content above the fold, your introduction will be the first thing readers will see. This makes hooking them with a concise and engaging introduction essential. This will keep them reading and reduce bounce rate while increasing dwell time. There are three main elements to a powerful introduction: Hook, Transition, and Thesis. The intro hook should pull in the reader. It is specific, brief, and compelling.