SEO For Human Friendly Website Design!

Are you optimising your website for search engines or for people who use search engines? Many businesses tend to think of search engine optimisation as simply keyword crampons levered in to place to scale the PageRanks of Google mountain! But in fact human friendly sites are equally key to driving traffic and page indexing.

The application of SEO to careful campaigns of PPC and link building around the sites, blogs and social networks is there for one reason only – to attract human traffic to click onto your site, build your brand identity and ultimately convert from search visitor to paying customer and regular subscriber /newsfeed reader.

Search engine ranking obviously helps greatly in the online marketing process, conferring both substantive authority and establishing long term value, but once a visitor lands at your site, the next crucial part of the conversion process has to immediately begin.

Search-engine friendly design is often talked of in terms of ‘crawlability’ or the ability for a search engine spider to crawl a site, and ‘indexation’, i.e. the ability for website’s most high-quality pages, videos, and images to be available to rank. But it is equally as important to be constantly aware of human site search goals, behaviours, and expectations, as registered by website analytics and monitored daily.

Established patterns of site navigation and positioning mean searchers have very clear mental models of how site pages should be constructed and where items should be placed. If those items are not in the right place or aren’t there at all, then the likelihood is that site visitors will be confused, very quickly lose patience and just leave. For eCommerce sites, this is clearly cyber suicide!

In the age of instant social media communication and rapidly evolving mobile apps and tablet readers, human ‘onDemand’ search results will not wait on issues of website accessibility.

SEO linking should be relevant, valuable and genuine – and take visitors to exactly to their expected destination.

Today, the proliferation of multiple search platforms means it is absolutely imperative that a website must be easy to navigate, and quickly arrive at the object of the search. Assuming that searchers will instinctively know what is clickable and what is not clickable on a site page layout is still a problematic issue, alongside unchecked, broken links.

Remember – if a website is confusing and difficult to navigate, visitors will not wish to subscribe or engage, traffic drops off, bookmarking ceases, and site content is no longer retweeted or linked to via social media.