SEO, or Search Engine Optimization , is something that many webmasters are now obsessing over. Many web site owners are spending countless hours tweaking and modifying their web sites, adding keyword rich content, and spending hours obtaining back links, so that their site will rank higher in search engines. It is true that over 90% of all web surfers use search engines to visit sites on a regular basis, but should web masters and those who perform web site design build and tweak sites for search engines, or for their visitors?
The answer to this question is that when building a website, you are not targeting web search engine crawlers, you are targeting people. Hence, you should build a web site for humans, not for Search Engine Optimization purposes only. The whole purpose of creating a web site is so that you can get traffic. Without traffic, a web site is worthless. No matter how many features and how functional your site is, without traffic, your design and functionality do not matter. Although search engines can help bring in traffic, web sites that are designed for search engines alone are often not designed for human visitors and all the traffic that your web site gets will be worthless. Visitors will visit and then soon leave your web site and not return again. Return visitors are critical for the success of any web site.
One good example of optimizing for search engines only is some webmasters tend to stuff tons of keywords into the Meta-Tags and site; this is a very bad practice and will get the site blacklisted. Moreover, this black hat technique does not benefit the users.
Hence, when building a web site, one should build it for human visitors. IfYou can SEO and make your site readable but it will take work. You want to be able to put in your keywords – just don’t stuff them in so much that the site is unreadable. You want good content and you want your visitors to know what you do. Doing both Search Engine Optimization and having good content for your readers is possible with a little thought. You don’t want your visitors to read and be disgusted by the keyword spam.The more people that visit and link to your web site, the more popular it well become and naturally, it will be ranked higher in search engines. Also, rather than spending hours building links for SEO purposes, that time could be better spent on adding features to your web site which would prompt more people to return to your site and stay at your web site for a longer period of time.
In conclusion, although spending lot of time on SEO and increasing your search engine rankings in the short run is great, the visitors you get from your Search Engine Optimization efforts will not be valuable as chances are they will not visit again. If you build your websites for people, your traffic will grow and search engine rankings will rise naturally. The best way to build a successful web site is to build for people, use keywords sparingly, and allow your web site to naturally move up search engine rankings.
