Don’t think about SEO first – think about your audience

In many industries there is a real pressure for website owners and managers to drive traffic, leads and sales. Often search engine optimisation SEO is hailed as a panacea to ensure good rankings on search engine results pages SERPs.

However if you are tempted to storm off down this route, stop and reflect on some key questions.

Have you first considered your site users and the needs of different visitor audiences?
Is your current content strong enough to engage 1st time visitors?
Is there enough additional content to provide a compelling reason for visitors to return?
Does your site provide the right visual appeal for your market?

If the answer to these question is YES than approach SEO in a structured way. Look at improving on-page factors first such as page titles, headings, link anchor text, body copy and image alt tags. However do all of these things with actual users in mind.

Think about what they will be searching for. Think about the flow of your pages and your signposting through the site. Answer their original search query, then make them want to stick around to explore the rest of the site.

For anyone looking for a great summary of on-page factors to look at, SEOmoz produced this guide.

The post outlines the approach to take to optimising

HTML Head Tags
Page Title
Meta Description
Meta Keywords
Meta Robots
URL structure
Body Tags
Keyword use and keyword density
H1 tags
Alt tags
Image names and filenames
Internal linking

Whilst these factors will have an impact they are not as important as

The trust and authority of the domain
The quality of the content
The quality and relevance of inbound links (especially the anchor text) to the site

You an find the full SEOmoz article here

Tags: seo