Thursday, September 24, 2009

Building Websites That Cater to Users and Search Engines

By Amy Nutt

Introduction

There are many people in the world today that are interested in building websites for one reason or another. If you build websites however, you need to figure out a way to balance the classic interests that tend to pull websites in one direction or another.

Right now, the two biggest competing interests for most people are websites that cater to users and websites that cater to search engines. In order to be truly successful, a website needs to do a little bit of both. This article will give you a bit of grounding in how that can be accomplished through certain strategies.

Selective Link Building

The first of these strategies is the strategy of selective link building. If you are truly interested in building websites that cater to users and search engines, selective link building is easily going to be the strategy that makes the most sense in your particular situation. Think about it from the point of view of both the user and the search engine.

The search engine definitely likes the fact that your website has a lot of links point in its direction and for that reason will rank your website higher in the search engine listings. If you link build such that you are only providing links to good and/or useful websites for the people that visit your websites, this can also be something that caters to users. This is a good example of balancing the needs of your users against the needs of the search engines that ultimately get you more users through higher search engine rankings.

Title Optimization

Search engine optimization is primarily an off-site game, but as anyone that has done it before with any level of success knows it is also something that can be helped along if some elements are present on the page. The best way to look at SEO for catering to both users and search engines is to use the BUM marketing approach to title optimization.

When BUM marketing is discussed, it is usually within the context of placing the keyword once or twice in the title while making the body content organic. This is something that will cater to your users in the actual reading of the content, but also something that will cater to search engines because of the presence of your targeted keyword in both the header and body titles. Once again, this is a way to take a standard search engine strategy and modify it slightly so that it also keeps your users in mind.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, one thing that you really do need to decide when it comes to search engines is what type of website you are going to be. Do you want to be a hub of users and make your money that way? Do you just want to be a random search engine site at the front that people click on? What you want to be to a large extent will influence your strategy for catering to both users and search engines. The above two are just example

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