Who are you optimising for?
A bit of an open question this. But it’s all well and good optimising a website, but you have to know exactly who it is that you’re targeting. Is it the customer? If so what is your demographic, what language do they use and how should they be addressed? If it’s the search engine, then which one and how are you going to focus efforts?
The truth is optimising for a search engine is likely to be fruitless. The kinds of websites that actually do this aren’t out there for visitor satisfaction, they just want traffic. They’re the kind of black hat SEO sites that have endless links and a few Google ads on the side. As I’ve mentioned previously, optimisation is a balancing act between the audience and search engines; but your visitor must always be given the priority.
It sounds convoluted, maybe even flawed, but there’s no reason why you can’t produce an audience targeted website and improve your rankings in Google, Bing and Yahoo. Due to this slight confusion, which is in truth faced by many webmasters, the thrust of what a website is actually trying to achieve is often lost.
You need to have a clearly defined vision of what it is that you want to achieve and who it is that you’re targeting. Correctly addressing the audience can make all the difference; particularly with the short space of time you have to convince anybody that lands on one of your pages that you are worth investigating further. Choice of language can help you create an immediate rapport, whether that’s promoting your authority or easy going approachability, it is important that you optimise for your audience.
But here comes the balance; you also can’t forget about those all-important search engines. The likelihood is that if you have produced good quality content, the search engines should find sufficient key phrases to rank you for. But that does rely on a little luck. To remove any doubt, just do a little keyword research.
You don’t need to overhaul your copy to splice in a few ugly terms, you just need to be aware of them. Copy should still be targeted at whatever audience you are looking to attract, but if you have an opportunity to naturally include a relevant key phrase it ought to be taken.
Behind the scenes, where the public can’t see what you’re up to, you can start to develop your Meta and Title tags to ensure that they match your newly defined keywords. This is a great way to optimise for search engines without compromising your site’s visage.
So the moral of this optimising tale is to never forget who it is that you’re really targeting. Google might be where your traffic is coming from, but ultimately that traffic is made up of human consumers, all of whom need to be entertained, informed or sold to. Don’t forget about the Googlebot, but that should always remain your second priority when you come to optimise.
