Posts Tagged ‘search engines’
Effectively Marketing Your Site For End-Users
Although it can often times be easy to forget, first and foremost the essential and fundamental truth about websites which transcends all the conjecture floating around in cyberspace by so called SEO and internet marketers is this: Sites that do not work for end users (i.e., customers, visitors, and browsers) absolutely do not work! Websites are simply no good for anything or anyone other than the self-serving ego of their creator if their primary is search engines… Most importantly, unlike us mortal beings, search engine robots with their crawling spiders — limited only to that which was programmed into their silicon chips and lacking any free-will — never forget this truth! Relentlessly crawling and collecting words and link sources, search engine robots always put the end-user friendliness and content quality high on the priority list of factors when they are assigning return position and/or page rank of all sites. So the next time you stumble across a site and read that backlinks — one way links, regardless of quality or relevancy – have become the crème de la crème of search-engine optimization and are the only kinds of links the search engines are still including in their ranking calculations, just bear one thing in mind:
This unfounded myth is patently incorrect!
Go ahead… ask! Don’t be shy? I already know; your wondering how I or anyone else would know this, right? It’s relatively simple. Because they (the search engines) say so! That’s correct… facts right from the source. And there’s no better place to get the facts, unless of course you wish to skewer them for self-serving interests?
Now before I go any further, perhaps you might be thinking, “yea right; why should I believe what the search engines publish?” “Such and such site states that one-way backlinks are gospel, and that search engine technicians and publicists are likely to misguide webmasters to try and keep their algorithm parameters (or some other off-the-wall rubbish) a secret … For this type of proposition I would be forced to respond with a few simple questions?
- What are the credentials of the author at such and such site, and where does he or she obtain the factual basis to support their proposition?
- What is it at the such and such site that they are marketing or otherwise looking to: a) gain from you, or b) keep from you?
- Why would anyone render anything from an internet marketer, webmaster, or SEO — whose identity may or may not be available — gospel over the credibility of huge corporate businesses whose ultimate goal is to become most popular by rendering the best end results for people searching for things? It is my experience that the primary goal of search engines is that they want your legitimate, popular, and NO SPAM site to perform well for the customer just as badly as you do.
What the major search engines state about indexing, return position, and page rank:
Google:
“make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.”
~Official Quality Guidelines
Yahoo!:
It prefers to index “pages designed primarily for humans, with search engine considerations secondary.”
Bing:
Microsoft advises webmasters trying to optimize for Bing to concentrate on making sure the site’s “target audience is interested.”
That is what they say, and they want NOTHING from me or you other than simple compliance with user friendly principles. Now back to links…
Good backlinks can often help a site’s search engine rating. All links are a sign of popularity or a “vote” for your site. Believe it or not, search engines do tabulate votes favorably as long as:
a) the links are relevant
b) the links are organically obtained; and
c) the links are non-spam in nature.
Now because search engines primarily trade in relevance, and make very few — if any — value judgments whatsoever, it is practically impossible for a backlink to hurt your sites page rank. And although backlinks can and will drive potential customers to your site and act as votes by search engines, they provide absolutely nothing in the form of value or benefit to your end users! They don’t see them, and probably don’t even know that they exist. Moreover, as for fulfilling the prerequisites of the search engines by creating “pages primarily for users and being designed for humans,” it becomes clear that one-way backlinks are detrimental to the rudiments of successful SEO and internet marketing campaigns which focus on conversion and targeted traffic.
On the other link horizon, however, are reciprocal links, and for the purpose of catering to the end-user they are the best link source. Here is why.
Not only are reciprocal links an integral part of making a site “primarily for end users“, they are also pathways to:
- how to tips and tricks for fixing stuff
- virtual rooms jammed with useful information
- portals to necessary service providers and communities
Moreover, a quality reciprocal link is better than a one-way link because its diverse nature enhances your site’s search engine appeal twice-over by providing both a backlink vote with search engines, and a forward link which can help you comply with search engine recommendations to “make pages primarily for users.”
What are Reciprocal Links?
Wikipedia defines a reciprocal link as follows:
“A reciprocal link is a mutual link between two objects, commonly between two websites to ensure mutual traffic. Example: Alice and Bob have websites. If Bob’s website links to Alice’s website, and Alice’s website links to Bob’s website, the websites are reciprocally linked. Website owners often submit their sites to reciprocal link exchange directories, in order to achieve higher rankings in the search engines. Reciprocal linking between websites is an important part of the search engine optimization process because Google uses link popularity algorithms (defined as the number of links that led to a particular page and the anchor text of the link) to rank websites for relevancy.”
Granted, quality reciprocal links relevant to your site are very tough to attain and take a lot of manual work, but the benefits achieved through your hard work serve the common goal of both you and the search engines by marketing your site for end-users.
When the search engines like your site everyone is happy!
