I’m working right now with three websites, and it struck me that they make a perfect example set.
One is brand new: I’m writing the content for it before it goes online.
One is a beautiful site, already up, with elegant web design and good stuff for the human visitor. It wasn’t really set up with search in mind, though. A lot of the cool design elements actually prevent search engines from recognizing what the site does. The challenge there was to fix the content so that the robots — who really don’t care how handsome your web site is — can tell what it’s for, without compromising the beauty of the design.
The third is written for the robots, essentially. The company is #1 at Google in their country for a very competitive search term, and the site is just bristling with relevant keywords. Unfortunately, the average human visitor is going to stare at the site thinking, “What the heck do these people do?” and maybe then head off to some other website. The challenge here is to improve the experience for human visitors without disturbing those enviable search results.
The one that I’m writing from scratch presents neither of these challenges. The challenge there is simply to write for both the human and the electronic visitors at once.
How’s your website? Are you making both the people and the robots feel welcome?
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