Is the Search Engine the most important visitor to your site?

Search Engines are responsible for getting the people onto your site so their requirements and expectations must be kept to the fore when new pages are being designed, or old pages revamped. However it's the content on your pages that determines whether your human visitors will stay, so there is a balancing act that needs to go on to ensure that the Search Engine and the human reader are both satisfied. Interestingly, the content on your pages is also of enormous interest to the search engine, and although the requirements of human readers and search engines do not dovetail in every department, there are common elements that can be successfully amalgamated.

The approach at Cygnus Extra is to put emphasis on the importance of good, well-written, carefully targeted copy. We mould site structure and content round the keyword phrases that your potential readers will use to find the site. Developing the right copy is absolutely core for the success of a site, and in itself, goes a long way towards ensuring that your site will be found by the right people. We will not sacrifice readability to optimisation, as we believe there is always middle ground that can be found.

Some SEO is done by tweaking sites to maintain a high position for particular phrases on particular search engines. This can be of value in some circumstances and a good well-written site will allow you to cash in on success if you decide to pay for further optimisation.

While content has a huge impact on the SEO rating of your page, it is certainly not the only aspect that matters. Link popularity is another vital area for getting your site up the rankings. Search engines use the popularity of sites linking to you as a measure of the value of your site.