Article in SEO

Finding the right balance when optimizing your website between having your copy readable for humans without any clear indication that it has been written for spiders has always been a pain for most webmasters, what is the fine line that we should stop writing for spiders and concentrate a bit more on our human visitors with the credit cards.

I've always came across websites that have done so much on-site optimization, that their website copy is either not readable, or it is going to take me a good amount of time to understand what this page is trying to say, neither are now acceptable for the major search engines especially Google and to an extent Yahoo and MSN.

The search engines aim to deliver the best relevant high quality content for their searchers, and now they have the technology and the ability to catch websites that have written their page's copy specifically for the search engine with no or little value for their visitors, following are some do's and don'ts that you should follow or avoid when optimizing your website's content.

The do's:

1- Write your web pages content with humans in mind, no point raking high if your website's content is not readable.

2- Forget keyword density, there is no certain acceptable percentage for your keywords to appear on a page and above that percentage you'll be penalized.

3- Target your main keywords in <h1> tags, and use 1 tag per page, you can use other <h> tags but you never use more than one <h1> tag.

4- Bold your keywords, again, don't insert your keywords where they don't apply, just write your content naturally and the keywords should fit in where they belong. You should also make sure not to bold all of your keywords, that wont look natural now would it.

5- Have clear and easy navigation, use basic html links to link to your main pages and to your sitemap, incase a user needs to find a page, he should easily be able to find your sitemap, same goes for spiders, sitemap's help spiders find and index all of your website's pages.

The don'ts:

1- Don't keyword stuff your pages, you can still see some websites placing 100 keywords at the header or footer of a webpage. They websites will be penalized sooner or later.

2- Don't ever hide your keywords using the same back ground color for example, search engines can easily identify such tactics and penalize your website or even bas the website.

3- Never bold your keywords and place them in <h1> tags at the same time.

4- Don't repeat the same keywords over and over in the same page copy.

In my opinion, optimizing your website for both your human and your robot visitors is becoming easier with each update the search engines do, search engines want natural content, which is way easier for most of us to write.