What Users and Search Engines Want

Essentially what all users and search engines are looking for in a website is useful, informative content. When searching, users want to be given relevant sites in the displayed results. Search engines will go out of business if they do not provide relevant sites, to search queries. To get a site to the top of a search result, it would make sense that the applicability of that site be the reason for it site being ranked highly in the results.

Like in many areas in life, there are short cuts, Black Hat tactics that can produce quick, effective results. However these results have reason drawbacks. One might experience a huge increase in site traffic due to Black hat tactics, but one often finds that these “visits” are too short to be effective or beneficial to the purpose of a site.

These users that are brought to the site are often annoyed by the fact that they were tricked, or by the fact that the site is irrelevant to there desired search. Either way these users will leave the site and very likely never return.

How are Users Helping

Short cuts will never be as truly effective as merely designing a site to serve the correct purpose, i.e. making a site applicable and user friendly. The fact is that search algorithms are getting more and more complex and effective in avoiding Black Hat tactics. The likes of Google and Yahoo are improving their search results through the help of web users.

Currently the Internet is experiencing an increase in social online communities, in which users interact and also rate and suggest useful sites to one another. Communities such as Stumble and Digg It, are being supported by millions of users who rate the sites that they visit, and this in turn is being used by search engines to provide more useful applicable websites in their searches.

The concept is obvious and easy to instill when designing a website. Users are smarter, algorithms are more effective and peer rating is increasing, so if you want your website to get more useful traffic then improve the content of your site. Other aspects of your site can not be ignored, content is king but it is not everything. Your site needs to be easy to navigate, well sourced and have useful, well placed links. These are all areas that will help when trying to get users to rate your site highly, and recommend your sites to others.

All Sites are Different

All sites are not different, there are over a trillion pages that have been categorizes or searched by Google alone. So it would be naive to think that all sites are different. So understanding your environment will help you design a more effective website. If your site is similar to a thousand other sites then your content has to be even more useful, very well linked and very user friendly and easy to navigate in comparison to your competitors.

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