SEO help for Human Visitors or Search Engines

Should we optimize our sites for our human visitors or for the search engines?

People always ask for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) help; however it is important to understand that the name can be misleading. Indeed although the name indicates search engines, who we really want to optimize for, ultimately is our human visitors.

Sadly, it is my strong belief that all of us at some point did look for something on our favorite search engine to stumble upon a website (though well ranked) full of garbage. With some very bad design, full of strange keywords and sentences making the content unreadable, and eventually not related at all to what we were looking for in the first place.

I started SEO Help to fight against those kinds of website and techniques.

Not only theses SEO methods are wrong; clearly you'll get banned and blacklisted by doing this type of spamming and keyword stuffing; your overall reputation will get damaged, and despite the fact that you may manage to get a high ranking quickly (and extremely temporarily before your permanent ban), in truth, you didn't get anything for the people who visit your website will surely leave it as quick as they found it for never return again.

So what happened?

It is a mistake that we all made at some point, to a more or less far extend. Some of us also make mistakes unintentionally, that is not doing anything illegal or Black hat SEO, but just forget something very important:

We design websites and use SEO help for the human visitors, not the search engines!

Yes, the basic of SEO help is to get a better ranking in the search engines, but one must not forget that it is not the end result!

Search engines don't buy from you! It's the human visitors that come to your website who buy your products.

As a webmaster, you probably have heard our saying:

"It doesn't matter how good is your product or how nice is your website, if no one sees it, it's worthless."

Let me add my saying to it too:

"It doesn't matter how many people go to your website, if it's crap, it's worthless."

In most of the instances, people look for information on internet, I do. When I search for information, what I'm looking for is QUALITY content to help me find out what I didn't know or to confirm what I was guessing.

In SEO, we say if you don't exist in the first 30 results (3 first pages) you don't exist. This is due to the fact that people will hardly browse further than 3 pages to find what they are looking for; I know, I hardly look further than the first page myself. And this is why the page 1 ranking battle is so fierce in our SEO world.

But let me add something to it, true I hardly look further than the first page, however, although I will usually click the results from the first to the last, as I mentioned before, I am looking for quality answers.

It doesn't matter the rank of the page, 1-2 or 8 or even 31 if I have to look that far. If the content of that website is not the quality I'm looking for, I'll leave. If it's really rubbish information designed just to get a high ranking (that is optimized for search engine crawlers only), I will surely leave and never return.

By using SEO for your visitors rather than the search engines, you'll benefit greatly as you provide quality content:

* Increase of authority and expertise in the view of your visitors.
* Genuine organic links for the quality of your posts.
* Returning Visitors (the most important).
* Ultimately, better ranking in the search engines.

It is fairly easy to cheat the search engines, but not so to cheat the human visitors.

Below are some common Black hat SEO techniques that you must absolutely avoid at the expense of having your website banned and blacklisted:

* Keyword stuffing. Fill your page with keyword to an extend that your content is barely readable.
* Keyword stuffing in images description. Instead of the name or description of your pictures, you put a lot of keywords there.
* Invisible keywords or links. Write lots of keywords or links either in extremely small font or with the same color as the background making them invisible.

I take the time to list those as you may do 1 or more of those especially for the invisible keywords without any ill intention. I know because I did it in my early SEO time. Even if it does no harm, it's not ethical to do and you'll get banned for it, so don't do it.

Article Source: http://www.wahm-articles.com

Nicolas Prudhon is an internationally recognized Internet Marketing & SEO professional, as well as published author. Get more Articles and Dowload Free SEO Help Tools at www.nicolasprudhon.com

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