SEO-it Article: Optimise for Your Customers

Simply put, spiders and search engines are trying to act like customers, customers that read your whole site's content and then make a judgement on it. If you keep your customers in mind, your search engine optimisation will more or less take care of itself.

No Google Guidelines

Google is without a doubt, the search engine of today, the one everyone wants a listing on in a prominent position, simply because it's the most popular and does it's job incredibly well.

But think about this, with the world of SEO opening up, countless numbers of books about it and websites, such as this, dedicated to spreading the world on how to compete in this lucrative market, why hasn't Google simply derailed how it indexes and what it's algorithms are?

This is because, if Google and other search engines were to tell us how they index, there would be an immediate wave of abuse of this information. Website's would tailor themselves to cater for nothing but the used method of indexing and usability and accessibility for customers would come second.

Google, and other search engines, are also constantly updating their index algorithms to make hem act more human, assess your website more fairly and combat the latest trends for those trying to trick them.

Customers First

Don't just think of any old customers visiting your website, don't see them through rose tinted glasses, but think about how different visitors to your website may look at different information. Give these customers the information they should be expecting from your site's pages in a format that clear and concise and you'll be a step ahead.

There are customers that just read your content, page headers, paragraphs and worded content, for these, if your text is well presented, headers and information in the right place and the main keywords of the page shown to give a clear idea of what's going on, this customer will be very happy.

There are customers who are visually impaired, and that use special browsers or text readers. For these visitors to your website, information has to be placed correctly in he code, they may not be able to see images, so correct naming of images and alt tags are vital, headers and titles need to be accurate so they get a clear idea of what's going on and layout mustn't be too complicated so text readers can quickly analyse the page.

Finally, there are customers that may not look at your site at all, but look at your sitemap and indexing information. You may have an RSS feed for information on your site, if they're reading this feed they aren't already at your site, but need the information to make them want to explore further.

The Ultimate Customer

The ultimate customer combines all of the above, and this will generally be your search engine crawler, indexing your website by looking at all of the information it's presented with, checking how it all fits together and all rings true.

Data on your website that flows, presents all the information as clearly and exhaustive as possible will be everything that a search engine is after and will use this information to index you and you will be rewarded for it.

Summary

To really help the search engines out, forget them for a while, just think about how you can present your website's content to it's very best and most useful, for any type of visitor that may come knocking. Get this covered and it'll be only a matter of some minor tweaks to make the engines treat you like their new best friend.

Good Luck!
Team SEO-it.co.uk