On this post, though I will still be discussing relevance you won’t get any more tips on how to increase your page relevance. Instead, I will be delving on another aspect of relevance, which is the that of your site’s content to the lives of your visitors.

Although SEO is primarily done to help boost rankings in SERPs and we can practice it by merely trying to (intelligently?) guess the search engines algorithms, this shortsighted approach to SEO is one of the reasons why many do not see that much effect with their SEO campaign. It is ALWAYS important to factor in every possible aspect that you practically can when it comes to your SEO strategy, and that includes the daily happenings in search engine users’ lives.

URLs that return 404 pages have always been a source of headache for webmasters. This is especially true for websites that have tons of pages, since the chances of getting 404 errors increase this way.

The good thing though is that tools like the “Crawl errors” page on Google Webmasters Tools exist to make it easier to track such pages. All you need to do to find all the URLs that return a 404 error when crawled by Googlebot is to click on the “Not Found” tab of the “Crawl errors” page.

The question now is what to do with these pages? Should you 301 redirect them all or should you just let them be?

Google’s bias for their own services has many people rethinking their SEO strategies. It even begs the question of whether SEO is still worth the effort.

Despite the seemingly disheartening future of SEO, I share the opinion of many who believe that SEO’s demise is nowhere near the future. What is happening is that we are seeing SEO as it evolves right before our eyes. Indeed, some so-called SEOs will probably flounder and fail, but it is only because they cannot adapt.

Google calls it user intent. About.com calls it “mindsets of search”. Whatever label you may put on it, the point is that search is all about the user.

I have already written a post about user intent and how it is the foundation of search. I did not, however, breakdown the different kinds of user intent, which the Google Search Quality Rating Guidelines (2011) spelled out for us.

Google classifies user intent into three categories:action intent (DO), information intent (KNOW), and navigation intent (GO). While the way Google determines user intent when they enter a search term is not really that important to us, we should still be paying attention to what WE intend to provide our users once they get to our websites. What kinds of users can we cater to? Which of their needs can we, or do we want to answer?

Google’s Quality Rating Program Guidelines makes it clear to us how Google’s raters view pages as they conduct manual reviews. The truth of the matter though, is that perhaps 99% of the pages that are indexed by Google would never even be the subject of manual reviews. The reason for this is that only the pages that make it to the top of Google’s SERPs, or those that are reported for non-adherence to Google’s guidelines (i.e. spam sites), get to be manually reviewed by raters. Does this mean though that you shouldn’t bother with the document’s content as an “in-between” site?