We all agree, the purpose of your website is marketing. But what good is your website, if very few prospective clients ever find it?
This why you need to consider both customers for your website; the HUMAN customer and the search engine’s SEARCH-BOT customer when you develop or enhance your website.
While the search-bot is hidden and is not planning a wedding, in many ways it is the gatekeeper of your website. If your website does not provide the information the search-bots need, chances are the bride-to-be will never see your website.
See a search engine uses the search-bot to find the websites that are likely to best meet what the human searcher wants. The search engines’ even have semantic evaluation of your website so that it understands that a “wedding cruise” is very different than the Tom “Cruise wedding” and will return the websites most likely to make the search engine’s end customers happy. So if your website does not have its content readily available in the way the search-bot “reads” it … it will not be displayed in a list of sites having what the search engine’s customer wants.
All this is called “on-page SEO”. In reality it is very simple. All you need to do is have a relevant title for your page then the content laid out in standard text. Headline tags will help the search-bot understand importance just like headlines do for us when we are reading an article. All the hype about meta tags you can pretty much ignore, most search-bots do and they are invisible to your human site visitors. And, if someone touts the value of the “keywords meta tag” become very skeptical about the rest their SEO advice. The keywords meta tag has been useless since at least late 2002.
What will presenting your website’s content in simple search-bot friendly get you? More human visitors to your website who are potential customers! Free! To get an idea of how well your site ranks in this facet of search marketing visit Website Grader and enter your URL for a free online evaluation. It is not perfect but it will show you a rank and some insights.
Related posts:
- Why should I care about this SEO stuff?
- Use your blog/website’s unique properties for search engine marketing
- Not all websites are created equal. There is a difference, the most important ones you can’t see.
- Flash based websites: “the accessibility and searchability of a brick”
- Target your website’s SEO to your target customers
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