This might sound like an odd question, since search engines are obviously tools used by the public to get where they want on the web. SEO experts will tell you that it’s not as straightforward as you might think. It’s normal to assume that search engines are looking for good, relevant sites to display on results pages. What isn’t quite so obvious is how they do this, what exactly they look for, and how smart they are. This is where SEO specialists shine.
You may well be asking how you can get as much traffic as possible from search engines, and whether your business is doing everything it can. As a real business as opposed to a spam site, you need to understand the process if you want to give yourself the best chance possible of achieving long-term success, and this means website optimization.
One key lesson to learn at the start is that tricks you can use to bring a higher volume of users to your site come with substantial risk attached. It’s possible that duping people into visiting your pages will bring short-term results. It’s a very shortsighted strategy when you take into account the long-term effects. Search engines and users alike have very little tolerance for ‘black’ hat methods of increasing hits to your site. In the long term your site’s likely to be classed alongside so-called ‘spam’ sites. Users will not want to visit your site twice and you could eventually be blacklisted or even banned from inclusion by search engines.
Instead of resorting to underhand tactics, SEO experts recommend that you learn how to excel at what search engines want to see you doing. In this way you can help your business toward short, medium and long-term success. What do search engines want to see? There are three major things you should do to carry favour with search engines:
1.Design Content for Users
In designing your site so that the content is good for users, you’ll be creating a site which is clean (i.e. uncluttered) and easy to understand (meaning rich in keywords). As it happens, these are just the things that search engines want to see when they visit your site and give you a ranking to determine your place on search engine results pages. By creating a good site you’re inviting other good sites to link to yours, another thing that will make you attractive to search engines. So, keep it relatively simple and learn how to maximise the potential of keywords for the benefit of users and your prosperity!
2.Marketing
Market the site as if search engines didn’t exist. This might seem like very strange advice when we know the importance of getting search engines on side, but like the first point, it works. Think about the basics of linking. Links are important for your business and not just there to make you attractive to search engines. Some of the basic rules about linking success for SEO make perfect common sense when we think about normal, reasonable marketing strategy. You’ll want good, relevant sites to link to yours because it will simply bring the kinds of users you want to your site and get you noticed in the right circles. Similarly, you’ll want to link out to sites that are relevant to your own users, so that they benefit and stay loyal. This is all great SEO strategy, since search engines take into account the quality of links on your page more than they do the quantity.
3.Make it Transparent
You’ll want search engines to be able to ‘crawl’ your site effectively with the spiders they send to find out what it’s all about. To this end, you should implement a design that’s friendly to search engines. It pays to understand the technicalities of what they look for, even if you’ve seemingly done everything right by following our previous 2 tips. There are a few key things you should keep in mind: use text so that search engines recognise what’s on your site and beware of flash and frames. If you have duplicate pages for printing, make sure the programs sent by search engines are informed. Don’t make link systems unnecessarily complicated. Don’t underestimate the importance of keywords in links and content, but don’t overuse them either. Design clean pages without wasteful content.Effective website design equates to savvy marketing. By consulting SEO experts you’ll maintain standards and get ahead!