Search engines are constantly searching for newer ways to enhance their relevancy to searchers needs. By helping web searchers in newer ways like universal search (results that include images, videos, maps and news) and personalisation (narrowing down choices to pre-preferred search trends), search engines are trying to build and leverage higher user-loyalty. Personlisation is enabling search engines to enhance the stickiness of the search result pages.

Leading the pack in search page personalisation techniques is Google which is employing many forms of cookies, data mining/tracking techniques to track user search behaviour and employing sophisticated trend methodologies to forecast individual search needs. Googel then displays results that closely match the users normal search behavior

This way the search engines are attempting to proactively address users usual search preferences as per their demonstrated user behaviour. Research shows that an overwhelming large (68%) percentage of users do not go beyond their initial preferred searches (1st page) and additionally only 17% browse up to the first two search result pages. This illustrates that Google and other search engines want to ensure that personalisation techniques ensure that the search results are always in the order users information priorities. This technique is good for users (preventing search-fatigue) and also god for SEO marketers as they now have to focus on targeted audiences web-content-usage/purchasing behaviour rather than only on popular keywords.

Leveraging Personalisation to Enhance Page Ranking
SEO is not only about optimising sites for search engines. While users buy products and services, search engines do not. Marketers should use optimisation to just reach users and delight them with valuable content and relevant services/products. However it ican be difficult for businesses to track every individual user needs and buying habits.

A smart technique to enhance your sites relevancy is to analyse buckets of consumer-behavior and build relevant work-themes around these. Instead of just focusing on popular keywords, web pages should be built around these well researched and tracked consumer behaviour themes.

Long tail optimisation becomes more useful. If you know more about your users, you are more confident in providing better results to your customers/prospects. Knowing what users are looking for is now extremely important. User-centric website development is becoming more important for all online marketers. In reality personalisation just forces businesses to enhance their site-relevancy. And a website that is more relevant to a particular search query will always have a top rank. Web-marketers can leverage page personalisation in the following manner:

• Provide well researched good quality web-content, always
• Make the website more interactive
• Give the top search engines enough (relevant) content per webpage to enable them to easily determine the topicality of that webpage.
• Persuade people to bookmark your site and induce them to return to it
• Develop clear reasons for people to return to your website
• Attract quality links to your site from other relevant sites that your users generally visit
• Always provide unique web-content that induces people to link to your website.