Search Engine Optimization & Visitors - The One Thing You Can't Forget

By - Cathie Streck
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You've built a website or a blog and worked hard to create a web presence. You've probably worked hard to optimize your site so that the search engines reward your efforts with good placement and traffic. Job complete? Not if you haven't thought about your visitors.

We've all heard "content is king" and about the importance of search engine optimization but what some people don't realize is that your visitor, or traffic, is actually king. Content is Queen for sure and SEO is the redheaded step-child that is constantly changing, evolving and annoying us. They should all work hand-in-hand for the benefit of the kingdom, your web site or blog.

The importance of the experience your visitors have on your site is often overlooked. With so much emphasis on search engine optimization, it's easy to forget that it's people that visit your site, bookmark it, Digg it and recommend it to their friends and family. It's your visitors that return to your site and make you money. Sure, the search engines send those people to you but if they don't want to stay, return, bookmark or recommend your site to a friend it's kind of meaningless. Those visitors are like a mother-in-law that only finds fault in how you keep your house and raise your children. Sometimes mother-in-laws are right. It's best to optimise your site for your visitors as well as the search engines. Make your visitors comfortable, clean the house before they come and make it a pleasant stay. They'll want to come back.

When people say "traffic" or "heavy traffic" in the non-cyber world it's usually considered an annoyance or hindrance and has a negative connotation. It's a bad thing. In the cyber world, heavy traffic is a good thing, something you look forward to, something you invite with open arms. But when you consider the people visiting your website "traffic" it becomes very impersonal. That's why I have always preferred to refer to the people that visit my sites as visitors, not traffic. It's more personal and keeps me on track where it concerns my site's friendliness to my visitors. It never lets me forget to optimize my site for my visitors.

In the cyber world, being hospitable to your visitors means quality content, quality link structure, continuity and eye appeal. We've all seen ad riddled web sites, sites that are disorganized and sites with poor link structure. The kind of sites that get you clicking the back button in your browser before the page even finishes loading the second image. When that happens did that site receive traffic? Yes, but the way I look at it, it didn't receive a visitor.

Page Structure

Your page's structure, how the page is laid out, is very important. I have always preferred an image or text title in the header, a side bar for links on the left hand side of the page, content in the center and site navigation repeated in the footer for convenience. Maybe it's because that's how web pages were generally structured years ago and I got used to it, I don't know, but it's the way I prefer to read a web page. It's a structure I'm comfortable with and I immediately know, without much or any thought, how to navigate the site. It's like reading a book. First you look down the page and then from left to right. Most visitors will do the same. Title, navigation and then content. It's a winning page layout in my opinion.

Navigation on the right side seem awkward to me and too much linkage in the header just pushes the content, the meat of the page, down.

Link Structure

This can be a determining factor when deciding whether or not I like a site. Link structure allows your visitor to become comfortable while navigating your site. I can't tell you how many times I've left a site because navigating it was either difficult or annoying. Along with layout it's the skeleton of your web site and what keeps it from collapsing. It's your site's foundation and getting it right the first time can save you headaches later on.

A simple example of bad link structure would be no link back to the homepage or a link back to the homepage that's not easily located. I've always made the link back to my index page the first link in my site navigation and it should be repeated on every page of your site. You should be able to navigate to any page on you site from any other page. It's a good, basic rule that works well.

Continuity

Your site's link structure, page structure and look (theme) should also have good continuity. I think that is why it has become so popular. Besides allowing webmasters to make changes easily and saving them time, it also makes changes to site navigation and structure easier to implement site-wide, eliminating most, if not all continuity mistakes.

In closing I just want to say that search engine optimization is very important so that you get visitors but optimizing your site for your visitors will get them to return and refer your site. Free visitors, does any webmaster have a problem with that? I don't think so.

Good luck to you all!

About The Author
By - Cathie Streck Please be sure to visit Anfe - Articles and News For Entrepreneurs at http://moneymymoney.blogspot.com/ for articles and news on search engine optimization, affiliate programs, home based business, AdSense, AdWords, eBay and much more. Feel free to re-publish this article as long as the "About The Author" information is included and the links work. Thank you.