The net is a wonderful thing. Almost any information in the world is accessible through it. As a searcher, all you have to do is type in the right keywords and hundreds of sites come flowing to your fingertips. When you think of it that way, getting traffic is just a case of designing your site’s content and positioning its structure in the right way. This is exactly what search engine optimisation is all about. SEO is like the bait sitting on a hook, waiting to attract the right fish.

A lot of activity within the SEO community is based around investigating the precise algorithms used by the search engines. The key to good SEO isn’t just this analysis of the technicalities of search engine behaviour, however. It’s also partly psychology.

The mix of architecture and psychology comes from knowledge of how search engines work. When an internet user types in a search query, the search engine runs the terms of that query against its cached information on websites and returns results based on relevance. This relevance is calculated using a number of factors, including the number of related keywords that are featured in the site and the site’s external links. The results are also ranked with some consideration to what the search engine knows about the site’s reliability, because the search engines are interested in providing reliable results as well as relevant ones. The psychology of the user plays a part in this process.

The information gathered by the search engines about your site comes partly from your site architecture. The places and ways in which you feature keywords, the way you structure your pages, the links you feature internally which lend importance to different pages, the pathways you set out for human and search engine visitors to walk upon; these all make a big difference in the way the search engine treats your site.

The other part of the equation is the psychology of the users searching in the first place. You may have the structures in place for search engine spiders to walk through, but you need to know the specific words they’re looking for. To do this, you need to know how your target users think. Discovering the strings of words that are best for your site is an art in itself, and this is why many businesses consult an expert. Talk to our experts at SEO Consult about balancing psychology and architecture in your SEO plan.

Websites are often compared to the real-life shops they stand in for. When it comes to SEO, your virtual premises need both to show architectural integrity and be psychologically attractive. A solid structure with clear doorways, well-placed walls and bright windows will help search engines discover the things you want them to see on the site. Just like a building, an old structure will be considered more reliable. The way you dress up this architecture, the spaces in which you place your displays and the types of products you carry will complete the equation.

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