Using Visitor Friendly SEO Basics
As a website owner, you should be interested in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Your knowledge of SEO and using it the right way, will help to get your website higher up in the search engines. But you must be aware of the unwritten rules and how they can affect you as well. Be sure that your website is user friendly and have it set up for an easy human experience instead of for the search engines. That is to say, you want to find a middle ground between the two.
To begin with, when a human visitor finds your link and follows it back to your site they expect the page they arrive at to be exactly what they were looking for. That will make for a positive experience. You have scored a point. More than likely that first page the visitor will arrive at will be your home page. That is where the hub, the center of the wheel where you will lay out what your site is about. From there you will be able to send your visitors around your site to cover different aspects and details. It should be easy for your visitors to navigate and very easy to figure out. If not, you have probably lost your viewer.
There are some common practices to follow – header at the top, a navigation bar across the top or down the side. Your site should be very clear and give them a clear path to take. Try starting them off with a listing of categories such as “stainless steel cookware”, “cooking utensils”, “cookbooks” in the navigation bar. When the headings are clicked on, the viewer can be sent to a page where the choices are even more defined.
1st click – Your home page (usually).
2nd click – A category.
3rd click – The meat, the content. The content can be your articles, product reviews, your blog posts, your case studies, etc.
Along with these, here are a few internal linking tips that don’t change the positive user experience, but matter for SEO.
- Think about combining your “other” pages into one. Having that one page should include your privacy policy, any disclaimers, TOS and contact info. That way you will have only one page.
- Try not to link to other sites from your main page.
- Those search engines like site maps and it could help the ranking of the internal pages of your site. So, be sure to have a site map for SEO purposes, even though humans will rarely look at it. After all it should basically be a page showing how the site is laid out and the links to each page.
- Be sure you are using anchor text. In this way you will use your keywords as a link to a different internal page you’re trying to get a higher rank. Let’s see, if your keywords are “diabetic friendly recipes and you want to bring up page C (where diabetic recipes are), you will do an anchor text link with those words on page A and/or B. As you try to make it make sense to the viewer, make sure you have good content on page A or B that fits with the anchor text. You will definitely want to write something about diabetic friendly recipes in order to use that anchor text. Otherwise, you could get accused of anchor text stuffing.
Just remember that you will have many keywords or keyword phrases you’ll want to target to get more people to your website. The best way to get this done is to have many pages to your website. The more pages that you have, the more keywords you can target and the pages you will have indexed in the search engines.
Page Set Up Tips
- Be sure to use your keywords in your page title.
- Take those keywords and put them at the beginning of the title as some search engines can cut off the last half of your title.
- Your description META tags should have a different description for each of your pages.
- Use H1, H2, H3 tags and include your keywords.
- And above all don’t duplicate the content you have on one page and put it on another page.
There is so much more to search engine optimization and this is just the tip of the iceberg. While learning SEO is very important you must remember that even though you can drive traffic to your site with SEO, those readers won’t stay , let alone buy from you, if you don’t provide a positive user experience.
Solid advice, Andre, and you’ve made some really good points here! Too many marketers and other webmasters get so wrapped up in their quest for higher placement on the SERPs that they forget the human side – and a highly-ranked page is useless if the visitor just shakes their head and clicks away to another site.
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