| Article Title: Websites for Search Engines or People? |
Who is more important to you as a webmaster: the
visitor or the search engine?
Needless traffic may be important to websites that
seek advertising revenue (well, they too need targeted
traffic) but you need traffic that caters to your
requirement. So for a successful website, both are
important. Search engines send relevant visitors to
your website and visitors do business with you. Both
should be an important factor when you sit down and
plan the architecture of your website. The
misconception that lots of senseless traffic is good
for business has been shattered.
Your website should read convincing both to your
target visitors, and the search engines. In fact, you
should treat search engines too as your visitors
because if you optimize for your visitors, you
automatically optimize for the search engines. Once
you follow the steps listed below, there is a big
chance that you'll create a website optimized both for
the search engines and your visitors.
== Well-written content ==
Both visitors and search engines like well-written
content. In fact every one of us appreciates an
interesting read. There used to be a time when lots of
crap took place to please search engines. Lots of
keywords and phrases were stuffed needlessly into the
web pages to make them rank higher. Scores of
"doorway" pages were created to lead visitors to
websites. They made search engines happy but confused
the visitors, nullifying the advantage and ultimately,
forcing the search engine companies to alter their
search algorithms.
But what really matters is the quality content. If you
have no content, or irrelevant content, what's the use
of getting hundreds of visitors daily? You need to
have website content that is user-focussed; you need a
web copy that talks to the visitors. The copy on your
website needs to supply the information your visitors
need to arrive at some decision. The content should be
written in an interesting manner, in an absorbing
manner. All the information that your visitor should
get, should be there on your website, in a straight,
non-cryptic language.
This re-affirms that professional content developers
are as important as professional web developers, if
not more. Badly written content can prove costlier
than you can imagine.
== Well-connected pages ==
All your pages should be accessible to both people and
search engines. When the search engines visit your
website, they should be able to jump from link to
link. It should be like an inter-connected network
where one can go anywhere from anywhere. Many web
developers create a sitemap that contains links to all
the pages on the website so that once the search
engine finds that page it can go to all the links on
the page.
Anyway, irrelevant pages have no business being on
your website and relevant pages should be within one
or two clicks away from your visitors (unless they are
password-protected).
== Less use of frills ==
Frills like Flash and DHTML look cool but if they
don't solve any purpose other than let you show-off
how you can make geometric figures dance around the
screen, you should avoid using them. The search engine
crawlers like the plain-vanilla text. Showcase frills
only if you're selling them (if you're a Flash
designer or a graphic artist). A company selling
organic manure doesn't benefit much by having a Flash
website that shows bags of manure appearing here and
there like apparitions.
== Use keywords sparingly ==
The search engine companies have finally realized that
actual content is better than nonsensical repetition
of keywords. Of course keywords are important, but not
because they are "keywords", but because they are
needed there. For instance, if you sell organic
manure, you have this phrase on your website because
you need to specify what you sell (unless you belong
to some underground organization that uses coded
language to communicate).
There is no need for a keyword or a key-phrase to
appear more than three or four times on your page. In
fact on Google you spoil your ranking if you use
keywords excessively. Let them appear at the top,
somewhere in the middle, and then in the end. That
does the trick. Weave around them a nice context.
There are people who do this as a profession and it
really pays in the long run to hire a content writer
who can write optimized content for you.
== Update frequently ==
Both search engines and people like updated content.
If your visitors expect to see new content on your
website whenever they come, they'll come again and
again, and they'll come with greater frequency. Search
engines too want to show content that is rapidly
updated so that they can display the latest
information. Make it a routine to put something new
every second or third day, even if it is one
paragraph.
== Use clean HTML ==
Clean code loads quicker and gets crawled (this sounds
creepy!) by the search engines faster. If the success
of your website really matters to you and if you want
to create your own web pages instead of hiring a
professional web developer, you should spend at least
a few days learning HTML. A search-engine friendly
website doesn't need much HTML to learn and it will
show clean content to your visitors without
unnecessarily increasing the load time. Avoid using
graphical tools and use a text editor instead. It
sounds daunting in the beginning but once your realize
its benefit, you'll be more than eager to write HTML
rather than use a tool that produces lots of
unnecessary junk code.
The efforts mentioned above take time to show result,
but they are long lasting and they fetch you the
desired results.
==========================================
Amrit Hallan is a freelance copywriter, copy editor
and a writer. He also optimizes web page content for
higher Search Engine ranking. Read his weekly essays
and articles by subscribing to
amritscolumn-subscribe@topica.com For Copywriting and
Copy Editing Services, visit:
http://www.amrithallan.com.
=========================================
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