Search engines or visitors?

Jun 21, 2005

This post here made me think:

Who is more important in terms of content writing and optimization? The search engine that sends loads of traffic to your website or the visitor who actually gets to read your content?

It’s a typical chicken-and-egg dilemma. Without search engines, there can hardly be any visitors, and without visitors, there can hardly be any sale. So both are important, both are vital to your online success. My personal experience tells you don’t have to make great compromises in case you want to make both your search engines and your visitors happy.
Search engines like good content and this fact has been established beyond doubt. It is now assumed that an optimized website is automatically liked both by the visitors and the search engines, and why not?! After all search engines want to rank websites according to their relevance to the searches. And how do you make your website relevant? By putting relevant content on it. As simple as that.
All you have to do is, choose carefully the terms you’d like to be found for, and prepare your content around those terms. Talk about those terms to your visitors in straight words, so that the relevant terms appear in your text without appearing nonsensical. Use your relevant terms in such a manner that they make about 5% of the total number of words on your web page. With a little practice, you can make both your visitors and your search engines happy.