SEO Is About Searchers Too
SEO is for Searchers too
In my recent “SEO Is Evil” post, I talked about ways that SEO professionals can get so caught up in the forest that they lose sight of the trees. Here’s another big pitfall… SEO isn’t just about search engines, it’s about the searchers too.
Getting searchers to your site
Some SEO gurus have called into question some old-school SEO tactics as being a waste of time, since the search engines don’t put as much (if any) emphasis on them. A good example of this is the meta description. In ancient times all search engines used the your page’s meta description as a factor in search engine rankings and to determine what a page was all about. Nowadays, meta description’s impact on both is minimal. However, I still council my clients to make sure they provide concise meta descriptions using keywords. Why? Because in most cases the meta description is what shows up on the search results page.
Think about it, from a searcher’s point of view. You Google something (or Bing it or whatever…) and get a list of ten candidates on that first page. Which one do you choose? It’s not just a case of always picking the first one, because if that were the case nobody else would ever get picked. No, we glance at the text under the link to see if maybe that candidate is the one for us. And where, you may ask, does that text come from? That’s right, in most cases it’s the meta description.
After all, the whole point of SEO is to get targeted traffic to visit the site, so whatever gets the rankings up AND gets the searchers to click counts.
Getting visitors to stay on your site
Once searchers visit your site, it’s your job to keep them there. Does your content run endlessly down the page in multi-column form reminiscent of a New York Times article? Again, the use of old-school SEO tactics like bold-facing and header tags may not hold the same SEO heft they used to, but techniques like these can visually break up your content and make it far more visually appealing. When a visitor’s eyes glaze over, that can’t be good for your bounce rate. Plus, it’s hard to convince a visitor of your expertise and authority when they’re attention drifts away mid-page.
These techniques, while questionable for SEO value, make it easier for you to engage your visitors and keep them interested enough to stick around.
Conclusion
When looking at SEO tactics that have been deprecated or demoted, remember to consider their impact on getting searchers to your site and retaining them. Don’t let them wander in the forest forever!
