The best way to utilize search engine optimisation is by understanding how your audience uses the search engines. Designing and building sites that use advanced SEO techniques is only a benefit if those designs take into account how users search. You want to reach those users – your target market – and to do that, you need to know about their search habits.
Build for Users
There is a saying in the industry, “Build for users, not search engines.” This means your site should appeal to the user not some insidious web crawler. Users want to find a site that answers their questions, provides them information and leaves them feeling satisfied. When a user has a disappointing experience, often it correlates to dismal search engine performance too. When the site lives up to expectations, both the search engine and the user are satisfied.
Most users approach their web searches with 1 of 3 goals in mind. Some want to “do” something such as make a purchase. Others want to “know” something such as the weather forecast in a particular town or the name of the band they heard at a club last night. The last group wants to “go” somewhere particular online such as to a specific website location like Facebook or Amazon.
When a user enters keywords into a search field, will he be happy with what he finds on your website? Search engines try to match that search with the websites most likely to make that user happy. The search words are the key to it all.
A user will discover a need for information or an answer. He will translate that need into a query, a group of words that embodies his need. Once entered into the search field, he will peruse the results presented by the search engine and choose one to explore more fully. If they were not satisfied by the information on the website, they will return to the search, possibly with more finely tuned search terms.
With this in mind, it is easy to see why SEO is so important to your website. It is worth the time, effort and money you put into it because it garners the right audience for your site.
Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Ask and Microsoft rank among the top search engines in the world. In America, one study showed that searches conducted an amazing 20+ billion searches in a single month. With that kind of activity, it’s crucial to your business that your search engine optimisation is done correctly.
Putting SEO and LSI to work for you in a way that makes your content useful to your target market is the key to business success. Stuffing your pages with keywords in an effort to draw the attention of search engines and hopefully readers is only going to aggravate the readers and turn off the search engines.
Keep your content fresh and user friendly and you will derive the greatest results from your SEO efforts.