Search Engine Optimizaton: Machine vs. Man.
Fourth in a series of articles on SEO and website marketing appearing every Thursday.
I’m not talking about skynet from the terminator movies, but I’m talking about website design where people create their website either to work with search engines or only for human viewers, cutting out the other half of the equation.
When creating a website, creators sometimes become fanatical about working in keywords and other SEO tricks but often forget about the humans who are coming to the website once they’ve used a search engine to find it. It doesn’t take much looking around the internet to find web pages which seem to be nothing more than a list of words on the page.  What does this type of website do for the person putting it up?  It basically makes it easier for the search engine’s spiders to crawl and index the page, which might give it a slightly higher placement on a search results page.
The problem is that while this is good for computer programs it is boring and unhelpful for a real person looking at your site. When visitors come to sites like this they tend to leave them rather than explore them farther. Â If the website is not human-friendly then humans are not going to stick around no matter how close to the top of a search results page on Google the site is listed.
One can also go too far the other way and design a site only for humans and it totally ignores the search engines.  An example of this type of websites is one which has nothing but graphics and animation on the homepage.  It’s very eye catching, but there is no text for the search engines to scan.  No search engine will list a site on the first page of a search results if it can’t tell what the site is about, and few people look beyond the first page of results.
It is vital to create a balanced website which works both for the search engines and for the human viewers. Â This type of design does take more thought and work but the results are well worth the effort. Â Ideally a website should have some nice graphics woven around meaningful text that contains the target keywords.
How do you know if your site is not balanced toward the humans? Â Just check out your Google Analytics for the bounce rate. Â If 80% of the visitors are leaving right after coming to the home page then the site is not capturing their attention enough to look beyond the first page.
How do you know if your site is not balanced toward machines? Â A simple look at where the site is listed in the search results.
In the next article I’ll look at lost opportunities in website design.
Technorati Tags: seo, website, web site, web marketing, search engine optimization, b2b, business-to-business
This article was first published October 23, 2008 on the Tatum Marketing blog
Fourth in a series of articles on SEO and website marketing appearing every Thursday.
I’m not talking about skynet from the terminator movies, but I’m talking about website design where people create their website either to work with search engines or only for human viewers, cutting out the other half of the equation.
When creating a website, creators sometimes become fanatical about working in keywords and other SEO tricks but often forget about the humans who are coming to the website once they’ve used a search engine to find it. It doesn’t take much looking around the internet to find web pages which seem to be nothing more than a list of words on the page.  What does this type of website do for the person putting it up?  It basically makes it easier for the search engine’s spiders to crawl and index the page, which might give it a slightly higher placement on a search results page.
The problem is that while this is good for computer programs it is boring and unhelpful for a real person looking at your site. When visitors come to sites like this they tend to leave them rather than explore them farther. Â If the website is not human-friendly then humans are not going to stick around no matter how close to the top of a search results page on Google the site is listed.
One can also go too far the other way and design a site only for humans and it totally ignores the search engines.  An example of this type of websites is one which has nothing but graphics and animation on the homepage.  It’s very eye catching, but there is no text for the search engines to scan.  No search engine will list a site on the first page of a search results if it can’t tell what the site is about, and few people look beyond the first page of results.
It is vital to create a balanced website which works both for the search engines and for the human viewers. Â This type of design does take more thought and work but the results are well worth the effort. Â Ideally a website should have some nice graphics woven around meaningful text that contains the target keywords.
How do you know if your site is not balanced toward the humans? Â Just check out your Google Analytics for the bounce rate. Â If 80% of the visitors are leaving right after coming to the home page then the site is not capturing their attention enough to look beyond the first page.
How do you know if your site is not balanced toward machines? Â A simple look at where the site is listed in the search results.
In the next article I’ll look at lost opportunities in website design.
Thu, Nov 5, 2009
Conversion Rates, Traffic
Written by: Eric Gerds