SEO and User Optimization

Optimizing web pages for search engines should NOT mean creating special pages just for search engines. Optimizing for search engines should go hand in hand with optimizing for web users.

If you do optimization correctly, your website will be attractive to both the users and search engine spiders. There are nine factors that can improve both the usability of your website and the search engine rankings simultaneously.

1. You need your web pages to load fast. The benefit to the user is that they don’t have to wait for it to load, get tired and exasperated and go elsewhere. Users don’t want to wait for web pages. The advantage to SEO is that search engines can index your web pages much faster and competently.

2. You need your web pages to be readable. Users don’t care for gobbledygook. Search engines can’t be fooled as easily as they could formerly, and they especially consider white text on a white background and tiny text to be spam.

3. You need the contents of your web pages to be properly formatted and arranged. This helps the user find what they are looking for easily and quickly, and lets the search engine find out what your pages are about as well. Headings, paragraphing, subheadings, tags and bullet lists are all helpful.

4. You need your web page images to utilize the IMG ALT attribute. This will help visually impaired and those who have turned off images to know what your content is all about Search engines can’t see images, but they can still index if you have IMG ALT attributes for each image.

5. You need customized 404 not found error pages, because if your ‘not found’ page contains links to other pages of your website (or a search form) then people are more willing not to leave your site in a huff.

6. You need an easily navigable website. You should have a site map and clear anchor text links that show both users and search engines how to find all of your pages. If you have printer friendly or other duplicate pages, you can use the no-index attribute to block the spiders just for those links.

7. You need your most important content above the fold. This way users with small computer screens can get a quick idea of what your site consists of. The search engines also work from top to bottom, so the sooner they see important stuff in the HTML, the sooner it gets indexed.

8. You need your web page titles to give a clue. If the users bookmark your web pages, a clear title will help them to know what it is, and find it again when they need to – also it will tell those they share bookmarks with what it is without the need to rename it. SEO is important here; make sure your keywords are prominent and that it would look good appearing in search results to entice users to click on it.

9. You need the URLs of your web pages to be self-explanatory. Make your urls as simple and clear as possible so users can remember them. Use keywords to make the spiders happy.

You can make your website user friendly and SEO friendly if you keep both ideals in mind at all times. It does you no good to SEO if you don’t UO (user optimize) so why not figure out how to do both and save yourself time and effort!

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