Better Readability for Improving the Number of Site Viewers
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Web content readability is an often underestimated aspect for a web site. There are design rules for designers to follow, and there are SEO tips and tricks for SEO experts to use. But this is not all. Though beautiful designs and search engine optimization are extremely important, there are also other issues that a web marketer needs to consider in order to run the site successfully. Readability is one of them.
Why Care About Readability When It Hardly Improve Search Engines Rank?
Unless you are an SEO company working for a client solely for page rank, search engine optimization is only one of the tasks you need to perform in order to make your site reach your clients. If you are an SEO company, you may or may not care that the actual result of your work may hurt your client in other ways. From the point of view of a poor SEO, getting page rank is what matters; if visitors do not return to the site, that is other peoples' trouble. This one reason for companies to be selective when hiring an outsourced SEO. A good optimizer will pay attention to readability and site appearance; a bad optimizer will only pay attention to ranking methods, so always ask to see previous examples of an optimizers work before you consider them
It is a different story if you are responsible for the whole web presence of a company, or if you are dealing with your own site. Often, somebody in house does search engine optimization together with other tasks. In-house search optimization might prove a better solution to some, because it allows the company to control both ends of the process: design and optimization. Although a good SEO consulatant will do a great job, doing it in house allows a company to define their own balance between optimizing content for search engines and keeping it readable by humans.
Why? Because having a search engine optimized site has little to do with its readability. On the contrary, as you will see later, there are some readability rules that, if observed without taking specific into account, could lead to a drop in your search engine ranking. To be honest, there are a few exceptions, rules that lead both to better readability and to higher rating but they are a minority.
This is one of the intrinsic contradictions of search engine optimization; sites are optimized for spiders, but they will ultimately be used by humans. It is easy for spiders. They do not have to read what is on your site, while your visitors do. If your site is optimized for search engines, it is likely that you will get more unique visitors, which is great. But often a steady flow of visitors comes from loyal readers who return regularly. Such visitors tend to love readability.
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