Does Your Website Have What Your Visitors Want?
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You've optimized your website for the search engines. You're seeing plenty of traffic -- but why isn't it staying very long? Could it be that you've forgotten what your visitors need? This article discusses some of the things you need to keep in mind when building your website to make sure it will be a friendly place for your visitors to spend some time.
Many SEOs and site owners focus on the various tricks that make their websites easier for search engines to read. They optimize their sites to earn a high rating on the search engine results pages (SERPs). This is an excellent thing to do, but the problem is that, in the process, many lose sight of the real goal: convincing your visitors to stay and (hopefully) do what you want them to do. Your website might score high with search engines, but what do visitors think of it when they click on that link?
If visitors comes to your website from a search engine, can't find what they were looking for, and wonder why you were listed so high, they're just going to click elsewhere -- and you have a problem. You want to build a website that gets traffic, sure, but you want to make that traffic stick around for awhile. That means you need to build your website not just for the search engines, but for your visitors. Fortunately, you can do both at the same time. Recently, I wrote a couple of articles that focused on some of the most important points for optimizing your site, focusing mainly on search engines. Now, I will examine what elements you need to focus on most to get your visitors to hang around.
Not surprisingly, a lot of these elements are similar to the points you needed to remember when building your site to be noticed by the search engines. But the emphasis is different now. For instance, keywords aren't very important from this angle -- but real content is. The usability of your site really matters now (and there are several factors that contribute to this). Whether or not your website looks professionally designed doesn't matter to the search engines, as long as their spiders can find everything -- but to a visitor, it can mean the difference between staying to make a purchase and clicking away to buy from a rival. And speaking of search engines and visitors, wouldn't it be nice to get visitors who came to your site from places other than search engines -- say, from seeing a link to your site from an article or a blog and wondering what all the fuss was about? In this article, I will touch on several of these points, and cover the rest in a subsequent article.
Next: What Makes a Site Usable? >>
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