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The accelerated development of the World Wide Web over the last years has transformed the Internet into a colossal information space with assorted and often poorly thought-out content. The increasingly growing amount of information is often too hard to handle leading online users to confusion, ineffective Web search and information overload. In this context, webmasters who aim at attracting and retaining their customers need to understand Web search behavior to be able to offer to online users what they are searching for.

Understanding the behavioral search pattern and how it differs from user to user or per clusters of users in respect to the interaction stream and information targeted when performing searches on the Web is fundamental to the understanding of how web ranking works. In the context of search engine optimization (SEO), webmasters focus on several factors that consider important with respect to web ranking. When those behavioral factors change, webmasters need to adapt their web marketing strategies in order to incorporate user behavior in their ranking algorithm.

The inconsistency in users behavior when engaged in Web search-related activities is so unpredictable that it requires focusing on how people search and what they are searching for. To that end, search engines, and particularly Google, track online user behavior and collect SEO data to use them as a ranking factor. In doing so, it is easier to turn prospect into regular customers, thus gaining higher ranking on the web rating systems.

In 2007, two experiments were conducted to prove that Google uses behavioral data in search engine rankings.

The first experiment surveyed 100 online users on a competitive website and 65 online users on a non-competitive website, excluding Google Analytics, to check if the number of clicks on SERP listings can affect web rankings. After two weeks, the number of clicks had changed the ranking of the non-competitive website, but not those of the competitive website. This led to the conclusion that the number of clicks from a search engine is not a major factor to affect web ranking.

The second experiment used Google Analytics on 100 online users to check their behavior on a particular site when spending on average 30-60 minutes every day searching for information on the site for a period of several weeks. The results showed that the more time spent on the site, the higher the ranking on the web rating systems. After the experiment was concluded, the

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