It may seem obvious to say, but the most important visitors to a web site are people and search engines and most web sites need them both.
But is any web page optimization you have done good for both of them ?
For a web site to succeed it must tend to the needs of both the search engine and to people and that’s not easy, as they can both be looking for entirely different things.
Designing a website to cater to search engines is generally referred to as search engine optimization or seo and designing a web site for people is generally just referred to as web site design. Designing a web site to cater to both is generally referred to as web site optimization.
The task of web site optimization generally includes web page optimization although it is possible to do web site optimization without much web page optimization.
The most important factors to a search engine are:
- Keyword usage & placement: Using one or two main keyword phrases on each web page placed at positions in the page so as to emphasize the relative importance of those phrases to the search engine. Use H1 tags for headlines and bold type in the body text. These on page factors help a search engine determine under what search results the page should be ranked.
- Page title and description: A unique page title and description the search engines can use for a listing in the search results, preferably using at least one main keyword phrase. For Google only the first 65 characters of the title and the first 155 characters of any description will be displayed in the search results. Search engines don’t like pages on the same site with duplicate titles and descriptions. They will often not index such pages.
- External linking: Google places a high value on quality links from well established sites, particularly if those sites have human editors. Generally quality is also more important than quantity. The link text is also of high importance in ranking the page.
- Internal linking structure & tags: How pages are linked and what pages are linked is very important to a search engine. Which pages are linked and the number of link to them tells a search engine how important that page is to the site. Additional ranking information can be provided to the search engine using plain text links rather than image links. This provides more information to the search engine for it to determine the topic of the page being linked to. Link title tags and image tags including a key phrase in the tag should also be used, but don’t over do it.
- Page & site theme: The pages on a site have a theme determined by the page content and the links to the page. The combination of the different themes of each of the site pages and the way those pages are linked will determine the sites overall theme. A more consistent site theme leads to more consistently themed rankings with the search engines.
- Site & page coding: Search engines live to consume text and that’s their main interest. They can’t read text in images and only Google has a limited capability to read text content in Flash movies. The html page coding for a page should be kept to a minimum and placed whenever possible below the text content. This makes the text content easy and quicker for the search engines to find.
- Google toolbar ranking: The little green bar that shows in browsers fitted with Google’s Page Rank tool to indicate a web pages Google page rank is NOT important to Google, or the other major search engines. The page rank of a page is no longer a significant factor in ranking for a particular search term. Page rank can however be important in determining how often your pages get visited by Google.
Search engines are of course interested in more factors than presented here. These factors have been established through our own experience and the research of others in the search engine community to be among the most important.
In a follow-up article I discuss those aspects of a web site to influence people the most when visiting a web site. Such factors include among others, visual appearance, visitor first impressions, the clarity of the marketing message, how quickly visitors find what they are looking for, page and site navigation, the offer experience and page download speed.
The relative importance of factors for people visiting a web site has much more to do with human psychology. Therefore web site optimization for people imposes an entirely different set of requirements on the design or redesign of a web site than those needed for search engines.
Try our FREE web site optimization evaluation to see what a search engine makes of your site.
About the Author: Tony Simpson provides web design and web site optimization service that enable site owners to get the most from their web sites.
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