Planning a website for visitors and search engines
When planning out a website you want to be sure to focus on your audience. This may seem like pretty logical statement, but what happens when your audience is in two very different groups? Even more compounding is when one of those groups isn't actually human, but rather a robot! That's right I said a robot, as in a search engine robot that will crawl your website to see if they should index and rank your site for any phrases.
Many people in my opinion make the mistake of "optimizing their sites for Google", rather then creating a website for their potential and desired customers. What good is having #1 rankings in Google for a particular phrase if when you get that traffic to your site they don't understand and cannot intuitively navigate your website? You've now lead a horse to a dried up river bed, at this point even if you could force it to drink there is no water left!
I do not mean to suggest that you should completely ignore the search engines, especially not Google. What I do mean is put them in priority order. Make sure that your number one concern is your website visitor. Ultimately these are the people who will become your customers/clients and will pay the bills so to speak. The search engines comes second, but not a very distant second.
A rule of thumb that we like to go by at Ignite Media is that if it comes down to being either more visitor friendly then search engine friendly, the tie should always go to the visitor. Perhaps with a little creative thinking you could accommodate both, but if that has been thought through always let the visitor have the best experience.
Remember, search engines are a means to an end, which is your website, not the other way around.
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Ignite Media LLC, Ignite Your Site™
http://www.ignite-media.com/
Website Design & Development eCommerce Development Search Engine Optimization
Many people in my opinion make the mistake of "optimizing their sites for Google", rather then creating a website for their potential and desired customers. What good is having #1 rankings in Google for a particular phrase if when you get that traffic to your site they don't understand and cannot intuitively navigate your website? You've now lead a horse to a dried up river bed, at this point even if you could force it to drink there is no water left!
I do not mean to suggest that you should completely ignore the search engines, especially not Google. What I do mean is put them in priority order. Make sure that your number one concern is your website visitor. Ultimately these are the people who will become your customers/clients and will pay the bills so to speak. The search engines comes second, but not a very distant second.
A rule of thumb that we like to go by at Ignite Media is that if it comes down to being either more visitor friendly then search engine friendly, the tie should always go to the visitor. Perhaps with a little creative thinking you could accommodate both, but if that has been thought through always let the visitor have the best experience.
Remember, search engines are a means to an end, which is your website, not the other way around.
--------------
Ignite Media LLC, Ignite Your Site™
http://www.ignite-media.com/
Website Design & Development eCommerce Development Search Engine Optimization
Labels: seo, tips, web site design
posted by Ignite Media LLC at
Thursday, April 24, 2008
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