Most webmasters and bloggers only consider the search engines while building their blogs/websites at the expense of their visitors. A poorly designed website can lead to increased bounce rate as first time visitors will quickly hit the close button on the browser and exit the site. Recently I was discussing with a fellow blogger who said that search engine is all that matters and I tried to convince him that search engine is just a means for a visitor or potential customer to reach your website.
No matter how well optimized a website maybe, if it has poor looks visitors may quickly go away on arriving on it as well, so one may ask since I am not designing for just search engines or human, who shall I design my site for? The answer is pretty simple – BOTH!
A well designed site is one that meets all search engine requirements/standards and also at the same time meets your audience’s expectations. Don’t freak now, it’s a very easy thing to do and this article will teach you exactly how you can design a website both search engines and human will love. Building a site is not just about acquiring a domain name and hosting and installing a blogging platform like WordPress on it. Designing a blog humans and search engine will love require some important things you have to do, so read the rest of this article carefully to see how you can easily achieve this.
1. Site Design & Layout:
Research has shown that both humans and search engines love a well designed site with less validation errors, enough white spaces, few widgets, easy navigation, white background and black texts, quick page load time etc. Your site design and layout makes the first impression on a visitor and this impression can go a long way in determining if such visitor will stay longer on your site or even visit again. If you have noticed most professional websites have all these in common, so why do something else? So the first step to creating a site both humans and search engines will love is by using a neat layout and professional design that will highlight the basic content areas of your site with easy navigation and easy way to share your content especially to social media networks.
2. Content Quality:
Your content quality will determine how your site is loved by both humans and search engines. Google and other search engines are penalizing sites for poor contents and less relevance to their chosen keywords. Same applies to humans, no human will waste his time reading a bunch of nonsense articles on your site, I wouldn’t and I know a lot of people wouldn’t. So if you want both humans and search engines to love your site, you must always come up with quality contents to impress both search engines and your human visitors. Do not write for bots alone, always have it at the back of your mind that you are writing for humans, simply optimize your articles well following search engine standards so it could rank for more humans to read.
3. Social Media Engagements:
Now this is one aspect most webmasters don’t understand, that you have a site and publish contents on it every day is not enough. Social media is the perfect platform to interact and socialize with your audience. It doesn’t look real to me when I can’t find an active social media link to an author, every author must maintain active social media accounts and always engage with his audience on the social networks, even search engine finds this very interesting and have considered social media activities as a search engine ranking factor. So if you want to win the love of your visitors and that of the search engines please get on the social networks and engage with your audience. Join blogger communities on Social media networks, socialize and interact. Be known by your visitors and don’t hide like you are a robot.
4. Content Optimization:
I could’ve added this point on the Content Quality above but I am actually separating it to make more emphasis on it. Content optimization or simply SEO is divided into two – On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO. While On-Page SEO involves all the necessary SEO measures we take on our posts before publication like Keyword research, Title optimization, Meta keywords and description, Internal linking structure within your own site, Keyword density, Heading tags (H1, H2, H3 …etc), Use of bold/strong/italic for the main visible keywords on the page, Alt tags for images – ‘alt tags’ text title added to the image files’, External linking structure to other websites etc.
Off-Page SEO involves all other activities done outside our site to help improve search engine ranking of our blog posts like Web 2.0 account creations (HubPages, Squidoo etc), Article marketing, Directory submissions, Blog commenting, Forum posting, Social media, Profile page backlinks, Social Bookmarking, Press release , Submission, RSS Feed Aggregators etc.
A well optimized content will ensure your visitors can easily read and understand what the post is all about and search engines can easily find your article using the optimization measures you put in place. Write for humans optimize for search engines. A debate has always been which of On-Page SEO or Off-Page SEO which is most important?
5. Build Mobile Site:
It is also imperative that you build a mobile version of your site as more users are beginning to use mobile devices to surf the web these days, in fact research has shown that there are more mobile surfers today than ever, so optimize your site for mobile users so as not to lose the traffic from there and your visitors won’t also be happy when they can’t surf your site from their mobile devices.
Search engines and humans love mobile friendly websites. I personally use Mobile press to create a mobile version of my website which enables users that surf the web via mobile devices to have easy access to my blog always. I will advice you do same.
I hope I have made this article easy and simple for you to understand how you can create a site both search engines and humans will love? Do you have any questions or anything to add to the article? Please use the comment form below to share your views.
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