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SEO is like a very long tightrope: as you start walking along, there
is little to throw you off balance; but as you get further along the
line you start to sway a little. It's all a matter of keeping your eye
on the horizon and keeping the balance just perfect!
There
are many sites out there that really do sacrifice customers for the
sake of their SEO. They keyword-stuff pages wherever they possibly can
and maybe they'll get high rankings, maybe they won't, but their
customers are put off because pages sound robotic to read (readability
suffers) and the pages are pretty obviously engineered for search engines' needs and not customers'.
You also have pages where the order of content is pretty idiotic, again for search engines' reasons. The usability suffers and so do the company's profits as customers go somewhere else that 'just makes sense' to them.
As
an SEO Specialist, I've seen some really crazy things done by people
who think they know all about SEO (for the SEO pros reading this, you
know the ones...). An awful lot of web designers and developers claim
to know all about SEO and it often doesn't go down very well when I
shoot down a webmaster over things when I get the chance: most just
laugh at me; that is, until I point out how stupid the things they have
done are. Their laughs generally turn to embarrassment when they
realize they know a damn sight less than they thought.
What
is the point of this article? Simple: don't lose sight of your
customers and your visitors. SEO is a very fine line that can be walked
and mastered very well with lots and lots of practice. However, getting
SEO, readability AND usability spot on is harder, but gives the best to
both robots and REAL PEOPLE!
Don't be tempted to inject keyword phrases willy-nilly just because there's room (careful with those extra <h>eadings),
or because you think they'll go unnoticed. A lot of the time you can
get away with it; sometimes where you put them 'just makes sense' and
that's fine and good.
However well you think
you know SEO, it is always wise to have a few people look at your work,
not from an SEO perspective, but as a customer or a visitor.
Let
me tell you, that bold text above is probably the best bit of SEO
advice you'll hear in ages, because after all, SEO is to increase
rankings...to increase traffic...to increase profit...to increase your
bottom line!
That's it. It's all about the money (or
site popularity in some of your cases), so put those customers/visitors
first; you'll be glad you did.
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