Snacks for the Spiders, a Feast for Your Customers

Search engine optimization (SEO) is on the minds of nearly all web masters. As a site is being built, the savvy web master is thinking constantly of how to optimize the site to gain the attention of the search engines.

To this end, web masters spend hours and hours working on keywords, title tags, description tags, and meta tags to act as spider food to get spiders to their site and return to their nest with a higher page rank for the site. In this quest, much time and effort is spent trying to think like a spider to attract attention.

While I do highly recommend that you learn how spiders work and what they are looking for (sign up for the free lessons from www.seoelite.com for a great overview of how to optimize your site), I further recommend that a site be built to attract and keep customers. While spiders, as they report back to home base and move your site up in the index, will help customers find your site, customers will not stay there or spend their money on your products if the site is not built for them as well as the spiders. In other words, provide snacks to attact spiders and a feast to keep customers.

To this end

Optimize your site for keywords that are relevant to your customers

Few things irritate me more than to search for "running shoes," for example, only to be met with shoe stores that sell everything but running shoes but had some web master that knew people would look for running shoes and might settle for black leather pumps instead. I don't know about you, but instead of deciding to buy dress shoes instead of running shoes, I move on from that site with a mental note not to return.

Write copy to tell customers what your site is about

Once a spider finds your site, it is looking for keywords that tell it what your site is all about. Guess what! Customers are looking for the same thing. Customers want to know, within a few seconds of landing on your site, if they will find what they are looking for within your pages. Use the pages of your site to inform both spiders and customers of your purpose for opening shop on the world wide web.

Provide the products customers came to find

As in the suggestion above, don't use keywords for products you do not provide. If you do not provide golf shoes, never have, never will, do not use the keyword "golf shoes" to rope customers into buying cowbody boots instead. People who are ready to buy from the internet know what they want and do not want to have their time wasted on sites that do not offer the products they are looking for. If, on the other hand, you do sell golf shoes but are temporarily out of stock, by all means use the keyword "golf shoes," but be honest with the customer to let them know that you will do your best to get the golf shoes back in stock as soon as possible and that you will let them know when they are available.

Make navigation easy for your customers

Spiders don't look at your site the same way people do. While spiders crawl a site in a set manner, right to left, top to bottom, site navigation must make sense to customers too. Make navigation buttons easy to find and simple to understand. Use words and menus that make sense to your customers.

Make the site attractive to people

Spiders don't look at anything but words. They don't see color, let alone pictures. While pictures and color can excite or turn off customers, a site is not indexed by the spider's report because it looks good. Read information on userability and site usage. Understand how people use the internet and what they are looking for in a site. Build your site to keep the attention of people, not just spiders.

In the areas that spiders see - words, glorious words - customers and spiders are looking for the same things: keywords that are relevant to your site, copy that tells what your site is about, and products they came to your site to find. Beyond that, make navigation intuitive for your customers and make the site attractive to people.

In the end, SEO must take into consideration both the customer and the spiders, and if it comes to a tie, break the tie in favor of the customer and the spiders will reward you in the end.


Copyright © Claudia Pate
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