Target Humans not Search Engines

The answer to this question is that once you build a web site, you are not targeting web search engine crawlers, you are targeting people and human visitors. For this reason, you should build a web site for people, not search engines. The whole goal to create a web site is so that you can get traffic. Lacking traffic, a web site is worthless. Bottom line, without traffic all the work you put into your site does not mean anything unless you have visitors there to experience it. Although search engines can bring in traffic, web sites that are designed for search engines, are often not designed for human visitors and all the traffic that your web site gets will be of little value. People will visit and then soon leave your website and not be back. Return visitors are vital for the success of any website.

Avoid Overuse of Your Target Keywords

One good illustration of optimizing for search engines purely is certain webmasters tend to stuff tons of keywords into the Meta-Tags; this is a very bad practice and will get the site blacklisted. Techniques like this are a great example of sites that add little or no value to the user experience.

So, when designing website, one must build it for human visitors. If you have text that are too keyword dense, the quality of the writing will not be as high as it should and many of your visitors will be annoyed if you keep using words over and over to get your web site high in the search engine results pages. This kind of low value for the visitor is another example of techniques that discourage repeat visits.

High Quality = Visitor Loyalty

If you create a website where content is produced for people to read and is well written, odds are you will get many return visitors who enjoy the quality of the content you provide and come back regularly to read any new content you may have added. The added people that visit and link to your website, the more well-liked it well become and logically, it will be ranked higher in search engines.

Add Features that Your Visitors Want

Besides, rather than spending hours creating links for SEO purposes, that time may well be better spent on adding features to your website which would encourage more people to return to your web site and stay at your web site for a extended period of time.

In conclusion, although investing time on SEO and increasing your search engine rankings in the short run, the visitors you acquire from your SEO efforts will not be valuable as they will not visit again. If you build your web sites for people, your traffic will grow and search engine rankings will climb naturally. So, the best way to build a profitable website is to build for people and allow your web site to organically move up search engine rankings.

That being said almost anyone with a bit of understanding can at least improve there sites rankings with a little effort.

First thing is to understand what factors go into a search engine ranking and how to set up your website for success.

Factors Affecting Search Engine Rankings

• On-Page Optimization
• Off-page optimization
• Back-links
• Competition for Keywords

On-Page Optimization

How well your website performs can greatly depends on how your website is linked together such as navigation systems. How well does the navigation

Some factors to consider when referring to On-Page optimization are

• Meta Tags – Page Title, Meta Description and keywords. These still matter especially the title and description but the meta tags are not as important as they used to be.
• Keywords included in header tags i.e. <h2>Dog Grooming Tips</h2>
• Content is broken up using bullets and other html elements to help the search engines but more importantly your readers determine what the key points of emphasis are
• Use synonyms and vary your keyword phrases
• Make sure your copy and content is relevant to your keywords
• Make sure you are adding real value!

Off Page Optimization

Off Page Optimization is the single most important factor when a search engine decides how relevant your site is to the keywords or phrases you are targeting.

Factors that affect off page optimizaition

• Backlinks to your website from authority sites
• Anchor text in the back links
• Directory Listings
• Social Media Links

Back Links

Although backlinks are considered part of off page SEO efforts it is important enough to describe in its own section.

A backlink is recongnized by the search engines as a vote for your website. The anchor text is also important in determining the weight the backlink carries for specific keywords the destination page carries.

The more back links a site has from authority sites the high it will rank for the keywords and terms

Not all links are created equal. If a link from a site that is not trusted by the search engine points to your site it will actually hurt your credibility. Make sure you get links from higher page ranking sites.

.gov and .edu seem to get more link juice than .com or .net. This goes back to the trust algorithm that the search engines apply.

Hopefully this article sheds some light on how you can improve your search engine rankings.