It’s possible to interpret search engine optimisation in a bad light. After all, SEO involves implementing techniques on your site to ‘trick’ the search engines into promoting your site. From the search engines’ perspective at least, SEO is all about finding underhand ways to weasel a way into a better ranking.

One thing that is not fully appreciated about SEO, however, is the fact that most changes on a site that are driven by SEO benefit users as well. Take search engine-friendly URLs for example. A URL with a series of linked keywords is much easier for a human user to remember and type. Many features looked for by the search engines in a site are exactly what users are looking for.

Users also react well to keywords. Taking the URL example again, a well-composed page address can give users a clue to where they’re going as well provide general information about the site. For example, a result in the search pages for ‘toys’ might be ‘Toy Pals – your bargain online toy store’. The URL of ‘www.toypals.co.uk/softtoys/gorillas.htm’ provides clear information about where a user is likely to land, including the fact that this particular page is likely to have been updated recently. The URL ‘www.toypals.co.uk/category167/25324.htm’ leaves them in the dark.

The ‘pleasing your user’ principle becomes most important when it comes to content. It’s fairly common knowledge that reading online is quite different to reading regular print. Your site’s users are likely to scan through your content and pick out the words they like. Your job as a content provider is to place interesting terms and concepts in their way.

Just because most users will scan your pages doesn’t mean that you can get away with low-quality content. This is because there is no one pattern for scanning behaviour. Some users will let their eyes idly flick down a page, some will read the title in its entirety before scanning, and others will leisurely stroll through your paragraphs. There is some behaviour that SEO professionals use as a guide, such as the diagonal scan, but your material needs to stand up to a thorough read-through as well as a scan.

The answer for many businesses is to consult their SEO firm for help and you can talk to our experts at SEO Consult about content provision. There are some things you can do to aid your users in your content design, however, including setting out paragraphs with subtitles, allowing plenty of white space or other clear space around text, and using easy-to-read fonts. It’s amazing what a few touches at the design level of a web page can do to improve your site’s usability.

The truth of all this is, concentrating on your users’ requirements will get you ahead of the game with search engines. It is certainly a prudent guiding principle when trying to steer clear of some of the grey areas of SEO and a great way to improve your crucial relationship with users. SEO techniques which try to work against the search engines and the needs of users can incur penalties.

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