SEO – It Isn’t All About The Search Engines

Whatever your website does, whether your goal is to sell a product or make money from Adsense – you probably spend a fair portion of you time working on SEO – doing all those little things that are designed to make the search engines think that your site is a better resource than your competitors.

SEO really is a vital part of building a successful website, and making money online is a lot easier if you can get the traffic. But there is a danger that too much search engine optimization can be a bad thing, and understanding how the search engines work can help you not only improve your search rankings, but also make your website better for the real people for whom you actually built it.

Know who your audience is

The problem with SEO is that it is all to easy to fall into the trap of building your website for the search engines, and as much as it is important to remember how they will react to your site, you should never forget about your actual users. Remember, a well SEO’d site might get plenty of traffic, but if it doesn’t fit well with your users, that traffic isn’t going to make you a whole lot of money.

Knowing what the search engines want

There are plenty of guidelines for how you can best build your site for maximum SEO, but I want to take a minute to talk about how the search engines really work. Google (and the others) need users, otherwise they don’t make any money, so the one single biggest thing that they worry about on a daily basis is how they can provide the most relevant results to their users.

Sure enough, they take keywords from your pages and look at links and all the rest. But the Google algorithm is constantly learning to better understand user behaviour, because that is the real key to gauging how good a website is. The long and short of it is this: Google looks for signs that a website is actually useful for the traffic that it sends there.

So you can build up your links, and carefully craft your content with the right keywords, but if your website isn’t helpful and valuable to the users who arrive there, Google will drop you as quickly as it picked you up.

The future of SEO

Certain things, like links and all the rest will continue to be important, that’s how your site gets noticed in the first place. But more than that, as the search engines get more and more intelligent, they will be looking more at user behaviour. So as time goes on, the things that will get you the best results in the search engines will be the things that have the most positive effect on your users…

Moral of the story: Build a website with your primary focus on helping your users, and the search engines will soon be rewarding you with more traffic.