August 17th, 2010 by Jon

In today’s competitive market, search engines are striving to provide the best service they possibly can to users. And when we talk about users, we’re talking about a lot of people. In fact, there aren’t many people aged between eight and eighty who aren’t familiar with the way search engines work. With such an incredibly high volume of people surfing the internet at any given second comes a wide range of personalities.

Audience

It’s true to say that people from every background search the web. How do search engines expect to appeal to all of those different kinds of people? How can they provide the ‘best’ search options when ‘best’ are entirely subjective? One clue might be found in the design of the homepage for that most popular search engine, Google. While sites such as MSN and Yahoo feature news stories and links to features outside web browsing on their home pages, Google simply has a white page with its logo, a query box, and some small links situated subtly at the top of the page. There can really be nothing there to offend any of the millions of potentially sensitive visitors who use the site each day. Once the user is at the helm, of course, Google will interpret their wants through the keywords they type into the query box, and thus a generic yet unique and tailor made browsing experience is provided to everyone.

Competition

Having asserted that search engines are competitive in that they’re very much concerned with market share, how should you see yourself as fitting into their plans? You need them to place your site on their results pages, so what should you do to give them what they want? Luckily, what they want to see is good content and usability for visitors. It makes sense. What would reflect badly on them is if users choose one of the top ranked sites on a results page only to be directed to a page that has nothing to do with their site, or, potentially, somewhere offensive to their sensibilities, as used to happen. We say luckily, because as a publisher you’ll want your site to feature good content and to be use-friendly, right? It is good marketing after all. Here is some advice on what search engines see as providing satisfaction to customers and good content.

Linking

Develop good link building strategies. The extent to which a site is user-friendly, i.e. easy for users to navigate and offering a high quality, relevant service, is seen by search engines as reflected in the links it features. A lot of irrelevant links on a page will tell the search engine that site might be spammy, and that will result in a poor rating and possibly even punishment from the search engines. Links to and from the site need to be of a good quality, i.e. to and from sites that are relevant. Link building within the site also needs to show the search engines that they are guiding the user around effectively. To this end they should be plentiful, named properly and lead to the right pages. Have a site map and plenty of links to it and your homepage so that users can navigate away from any page on the site. Another thing to think about is site maintenance; do not let standards slip by allowing broken links on pages that lead to non-existent sites. Be guided by sound link building strategies as recommended by good SEO services.

Standards

Tailor content to be relevant, fresh, attractive and useful. Sounds like a lot to ask? Well if you put yourself in the shoes of a user, it really isn’t. There are probably a great many sites on the internet apart from yours which offer a similar product or service, and if yours doesn’t provide the user with a good experience, they’re very likely to click straight back to the results page and go for one of those instead. Content needs to be exciting and that means new.

Conclusion
You might be wondering if it can be true that our assertions will make a big difference to your site’s performance, but you should never underestimate the value of good site construction. The internet is going to be around for a very long time, and if you want to get to the top of results pages and stay there, having a respectable site is essential. Sound practices are the best SEO tools.

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