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Websites for Search Engines or People?
By Amrit Hallan

Who is more important to you as a webmaster: the visitor or 
the search engine?

Needless traffic may be important to websites that seek 
advertising revenue (well, they too need targeted traffic) but 
you need traffic that caters to your requirement. So for a 
successful website, both are important. Search engines send 
relevant visitors to your website and visitors do business 
with you. Both should be an important factor when you sit down 
and plan the architecture of your website. The misconception 
that lots of senseless traffic is good for business has been 
shattered.

Your website should read convincing both to your target 
visitors, and the search engines. In fact, you should treat 
search engines too as your visitors because if you optimize 
for your visitors, you automatically optimize for the search 
engines. Once you follow the steps listed below, there is a 
good chance that you'll create a website optimized both for
the search engines and your visitors.

== Well-written content ==

Both visitors and search engines like well-written content. In 
fact every one of us appreciates an interesting read. There used 
to be a time when lots of crap took place to please search 
engines. Lots of keywords and phrases were stuffed needlessly 
into the web pages to make them rank higher. Scores of "doorway" 
pages were created to lead visitors to websites. They made search 
engines happy but confused the visitors, nullifying the advantage 
and ultimately, forcing the search engine companies to alter 
their search algorithms.

But what really matters is the quality content. If you have 
no content, or irrelevant content, what's the use of getting 
hundreds of visitors daily? You need to have website content 
that is user-focused; you need web copy that talks to the 
visitors. The copy on your website needs to supply the 
information your visitors need to arrive at some decision. The 
content should be written in an interesting manner, in an 
absorbing manner. All the information that your visitor needs, 
should be there on your website, in straight, non-cryptic 
language.

This re-affirms that professional content developers are as 
important as professional web developers, if not more. Badly 
written content can prove costlier than you can imagine. 

== Well-connected pages ==

All your pages should be accessible to both people and search 
engines. When the search engines visit your website, they should 
be able to jump from link to link. It should be like an 
inter-connected network where one can go anywhere from anywhere. 
Many web developers create a sitemap that contains links to all
the pages on the website so that once the search engine finds 
that page it can go to all the links on the page.

Anyway, irrelevant pages have no business being on your website 
and relevant pages should be within one or two clicks away from 
your visitors (unless they are password-protected).

== Less use of frills ==

Frills like Flash and DHTML look cool but if they don't serve 
any purpose other than let you show-off how you can make 
geometric figures dance around the screen, you should avoid 
using them. The search engine crawlers like the plain-vanilla 
text. Showcase frills only if you're selling them (if you're a 
Flash designer or a graphic artist). A company selling organic 
manure doesn't benefit much by having a Flash website that shows 
bags of manure appearing here and there like apparitions.

== Use keywords sparingly ==

The search engine companies have finally realized that actual 
content is better than nonsensical repetition of keywords. Of 
course keywords are important, but not because they are 
"keywords", but because they are needed there. For instance, 
if you sell organic manure, you have this phrase on your website 
because you need to specify what you sell (unless you belong to 
some underground organization that uses coded language to 
communicate).

There is no need for a keyword or a key-phrase to appear more 
than three or four times on your page. In fact on Google you 
spoil your ranking if you use keywords excessively. Let them 
appear at the top, somewhere in the middle, and then at the end. 
That does the trick. Weave a nice context around them. There 
are people who do this as a profession and it really pays in 
the long run to hire a content writer who can write optimized 
content for you.

== Update frequently ==

Both search engines and people like updated content. If your 
visitors expect to see new content on your website whenever they 
come, they'll come again and again, and they'll come with greater 
frequency. Search engines too want to show content that is 
rapidly updated so that they can display the latest information. 
Make it a routine to add something new every second or third day, 
even if it is one paragraph.

== Use clean HTML ==

Clean code loads quicker and gets crawled (this sounds creepy!) 
by the search engines faster. If the success of your website 
really matters to you and if you want to create your own web 
pages, instead of hiring a professional web developer, you 
should spend at least a few days learning HTML. A search-engine 
friendly website doesn't need much HTML and it will show clean 
content to your visitors without unnecessarily increasing the 
load time. Avoid using graphical tools and use a text editor 
instead. It sounds daunting in the beginning but once you 
realize its benefit, you'll be more than eager to write HTML
rather than use a tool that produces lots of unnecessary junk 
code.

The efforts mentioned above take time to show results, but they 
are long lasting and they fetch you the desired results.

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Amrit Hallan is a freelance copywriter, copy editor and a writer. 
He also optimizes web page content for higher Search Engine 
ranking. Read his weekly essays and articles by subscribing to
amritscolumn-subscribe@topica.com For Copywriting and Copy 
Editing Services, visit: http://www.amrithallan.com.
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