What is a both human and search engine friendly website?

Why search engine friendly? We firstly need as much exposure as possible for the potential customers to find us through search engines. And why human friendly? Obviously when someone comes we’d like him to fall in love with our services and products which are showed through the site.

I should say this is not a small topic. Actually there is no single standard to follow. Yet we all love good websites just as much as search engines do. Only by building an awesome site can we lay a solid foundation for our ambitious e-marketing plan. Although it is very hard to give absolute answers to this big question, we can still discuss some general rules.

Neat Layout

People love reading beautiful pages and we should make our pages easy to read. We need to take many factors such as fonts, colour scheme and spacing into consideration while designing. We want people feel comfortable when visiting our site otherwise we’d be wasting precious opportunities. As for search engine’s part, many site owners think the search bot is not able to understand aesthetics because they are machines. However modern search engines do measure some basic visual parameters of a webpage and they can at least tell what is a bad layout. Though not big, their measurement is one of the ranking factors. One extreme example is using black colour font on a black background which might result in being removed from Google index, because Google bot would recognise it as content hiding.

Original Content

I bet you would feel very angry to see the same content again and again when you are seriously looking for something important. Search engines hate plagiarism even more than humans do because for any search engine the lifeline is the quality of search results. If they serve users with bad repeating content, no one would ever use it again. Therefore not only do we love reading high quality original content, but also search engines give very high weight to an original page. I’ve seen sites, not fancy,  few back links,  yet filled with tons of unique information, rank top 3 for very competitive terms. So however time and energy consuming it is, creating appealing and original content is totally worth doing.

Highly Logical Structure

You’ve got good materials in hand and now you need to organise them well. It’s about hierarchy, priority and category. When I visit a site, I would expect to dig inside smoothly otherwise I’ll be tired and upset and losing my interest easily. Search engines are just logical creations and they analyse and estimate  a website’s structure faster and often better than us.

Lightning Response

Assuming all hardware and software conditions are ideal, can your site be loaded within one second? Of course everybody can do it if there is only one sentence on the site. So the problem is how can we make the content as rich as possible while lowering the loading time. Search engines understand this impatient human nature very well so they give considerable amount of ranking juice to sites which load really fast. I have to say this is something really technological. Although there are some many website builders out there, only a few can actually do this speed optimisation job. So be patient when choosing your site development service.

These factors listed above are just a few to mention, however they are definitely main factors of building a both human and search engine friendly website.