- March 8, 2013
- Posted by: Vishal Shah
- Category: Optiinfo
Search engine optimization or SEO is many times conceived as a magical key that can make a website shine and glow before search engines’ eyes, some people may think that using every single SEO technique out there will finally make the difference for their website, and help them to increase traffic and conversions. Nothing could be farther from the truth, in fact, overcomplicating things with SEO by applying more of it to a site could definitely result in more damage, because search engines act more like natural human beings, and in the eyes of a search engine, an over-optimized website could appear like someone who is desperately trying to get a little bit of attention, and this will be poison for the spiders that day to day crawl the World Wide Web. Fortunately there is a way to get more attention, and that is by optimizing for visitors first and for search engines second, so don’t go anywhere, because in this article I will nail the details to do that. Why should be important to optimize a website for visitors first and for search engines second? Well, there is a simple yet powerful reason for it, and that is this: Visitors can be converted, search engines cannot.
From here you can understand very simply put that even when a search engine will drive people to a site, the search engine will not make those people subscribe to a newsletter, buy products, or whatever that your final intention for driving people to a website is, thus, even a website with high traffic will not convert if the key ingredient is not there. Would you like to know what the key ingredient is? Very simply put: value. Value is the key ingredient that every single website need in order to convert traffic into sales, fans, followers or whatever. In other words, adding value is the way to optimize first for visitors, and the principle behind this is very simple: You will be paid in direct proportion to the value you deliver according with the market place. With this knowledge on hand it is a great moment to ask yourself how much value are you delivering, or how many people are you helping? That is going to determine the level of success of any website, there is barely anything else going on. Something else that is great to think about is how to increase the value, if you are paid in direct proportion to the value delivered, it would be great to know how to increase it, right? There is a true and safe way to do this, it requires a lot of work and education on your end, but the great thing about it is that it will pay you more than anything else before.
Learn how to add value and at the same time optimize your site for visitors
If you see your site as a business, then it is great for you to know that any business needs to identify four factors to deliver and increase the value.
Supply: This means to identify how much of what you offer is already out there, and contrary to what most people think, supply is your friend, because it tells you what is out there, and the only thing to do is to lower that supply by differentiating yourself, here is where a unique selling proposal will play its role, and will lower the supply by telling people that you are the only one who does it like this.
Demand: It is very important to identify if what you have to offer is in decent demand, because it is worthless to offer something that people won’t pay for.
Quality: Here is where you can make it or break it. Delivering quality is very important, especially in these turbulent times where the economy is bouncing a lot, it is critical to attract and hold as many people as possible to your offer, and this can only be achieved by ensuring that whatever they are receiving the first time is top quality.
Quantity: Being able to deliver more value will ensure those juicy numbers that every webmaster wants to see about his website. It is very important to help as much people as possible; this will determine how much you will be paid.
As you can see, optimizing for the visitor requires a lot more than just putting the right words in the right order, it requires ensuring that what is being offered to the visitor is actually unique, wanted, top quality, and as much as possible.
Don’t forget to optimize for Search Engines
Once that the site is really offering value to the visitors, it is time to apply SEO and optimize your site for those spiders that will come and crawl each page every day. In order to do this there are a lot of great tools that can be used, in my case I like to use WordPress and for that I use a plugin that helps me a lot with the techy SEO side. I’ve investigated a lot about this and in summary I’ve seen that most SEO tools focus on five major aspects, so it will be great to follow these rules and help your site to be optimized.
Applying SEO means to optimize a webpage for a specific keyword, thus it is important to place this keyword in specific places of the page so the entire document is optimized for search engines.
Page Title: The keyword must appear somewhere in the page title. This way the page is self-explanatory to the search engine and now the spiders know what the whole page will be about.
Article heading: When writing the article, it can be separated by subheads; there is also a great place to include the keyword at least once.
URL: It is important to include the keyword in the URL; all these places are read by web crawlers and from there they determine the topic of the page.
Meta-description: This place is very important, the meta-description is the portion of text that will be displayed on the search engine results pages or SERPs, it works like a summary of the page, and it is used by search engines as well to determine when to display the page.
Content: This is where is easier to place the keyword, it is important to use it naturally and not over populate the content with the keyword or keywords.
As you can see, the hardest part of optimizing a website is not on the search engines side, but in the visitors’ side, search engines are just tools, but what really will make the difference is your site’s ability to convert visitors into customers, so my advice is to create as much value as you can, from there, the natural principles and laws of the universe will make the rest. What do you think so far about search engine optimization? Does it sound like it is something obvious and natural now? Guess what? You are right! Let us know your thoughts and leave a comment. To your online success!
About the author
Jose Lozano – Blogger, successful entrepreneur, online publisher he is always learning as much information as possible about successful online businesses. This whole journey started for Jose thanks to his passion for remote control helicopters, he finally decided to start a website where he posts remote control helicopter reviews and thus help more hobbyists like him with his knowledge.