Sunday, February 1, 2009

Remember Your Human Visitors

It’s important to have a search engine friendly Website. Just be sure not to get carried away and forget about your human readers.

Have you ever done a search and ended up on a page that read like total gibberish? Maybe you found a good title and then just a bunch of keywords crammed together under that.

This is an extreme example of course. But a surprising number of new Web marketers get carried away with keyword placement and end up with Web content that just doesn’t make any sense.

The thing to remember is, search engine robots don’t have credit cards. They might “like” your content and rank you high in the results but they aren’t going to buy anything from you.

And no matter how high in the results you page ends up, if people can’t make any sense of your message, or if they find it clumsy due to keyword stuffing, they probably won’t stay long.

The truth is you can create pages that are very search friendly and still write great copy that your human visitors will appreciate and react well to. Your main emphasis in terms of onsite SEO should be a good HTML title, proper image tags, a good page heading and a few well-placed keywords.

That’s really enough to do the trick. Especially when you consider that offsite optimization, or quality back links, is far more important to your overall search position.

Once you’ve built a solid template and used keywords appropriately in your content you should focus on getting as many well-anchored back links as possible. This will push you to the top of the rankings more quickly than stuffing your pages with keywords and it will do so in a away that doesn’t result in poor quality content.

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