The Human Factor - the Dark Side of SEO

7 Dec 2006 at 12:03 by Eric Morgan

When you or someone else manages a SEO campaign for your website do you implement the human factor into your campaign? If not you sould, find out why here.

Although this topic is gaining more and more attention by internet marketers and business owners there are still many out there who do not fully understand the importance of the 'human factor' when managing an SEO campaign.

What is the human factor?
The human factor is simple: the process of taking into consideration how a human website visitor will react to your website or webpage, not just a search engine. Many search engine optimizers only focus on getting the rankings and the traffic. While this is good it is only half of the equation.

What Happens if I don't consider the human factor?
I am sure everyone has had this experience: you search for something on Google or Yahoo and click on the first result that comes up, however upon landing on the website you immediatly see a garble of text and web copy that makes no sense at all, it is cluttered with google ads and does not have any relevant information you were looking for. You immediatly cilck the 'back' button in the web browser and continue searching.

The page you viewed was only optimized for search engines, they did their job of getting in the #1 spot for the keyword phrase you were searchign for, however almost all website visitors that visit the page will most likely leave within 1-2 seconds because there is not relevant information on the page.

So how should I implement this with SEO?
Imagine this situation. You search for something in Google and click on the first webpage that comes up. You go to a page with exactly the information you were looking for, the design of the website is clean, there is no clutter, the information is straight to the point, and the navigation is easy to use to continue browsing the website. That is how you implement the human factor. This is especially true for text and web copy. When you are writing content for your website make sure that it is first optmiized for a human visitor and second that it is easily accessible to the search engines and you will find success.

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