We design modern, expandable websites for small, medium, and large businesses in the Greater Houston area and place design, usability, and extensibility at the core of every project.
Your website needs more than just a pretty face; it needs to be findable. We use proven white-hat techniques to drive potential clients to your site.
Social media helps you extend your presence to a huge online audience and allows you to interact with your visitors through engaging conversation. We can properly introduce you to the virtual Houston community.
Whether it be print or web-based, we take pride in producing high-quality graphics that help your company position itself as a leader in the Houston market.
Speak directly to your customers through video and allow them to interact with your site in ways not possibly through conventional methods.|
Nov 12
2008
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SEO - Balancing for Machines and HumansPosted by Joseph Leon in usability, seo, searchability, finder friendly |
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A big part of SEO is balancing your site to meet the needs of both machines and humans. Using web standards compliant code will make your site truly optimized for both users.
For the most part sites has two main visitors. First, there are machines or robots that scan your site and index your code. These "bots" are used to rank your site on search engine result pages. If code is not written to follow web standards it can confuse robots and hurt your search ranking. Second, there are human visitors that expect to see meaningful well organized content. Websites must be designed for both of these unique users.
It is best to avoid creating a "hostile" environment for human visitors. Create useful and nice looking pages so human visitors return. Avoid spamming links or having content that looks "spammy". Write sentences that make sense and organize your information in a meaningful and logical structure. This means making the main idea of a page in H1 and the sub ideas in H2s and H3s. Place all regular text inside P tags. To improve on this it is important to include B tags around keywords, but remember to not bold too many words. If too many words are bold then your page is not human friendly.
Including meaningful lists also improves ranking using ULs and LIs in your HTML. The bots prioritize the information on these list higher than normal text inside P tags. Here too, you will have to balance for the human visitors. If a site has spam lists with 25 bullet items, human visitors to the site will be quick to hit the back button. Make lists short, keyword rich, and meaningful to your content and visitors.
The frame of mind as a designer is best in a balanced state. Designing and coding for both humans and robots will make your site the best it can be. Neglecting one will leave a site either low on search engine lists and low on visitors. Robots do not care what a site looks like and humans do not care what code looks like (excluding nerds like me). Design for both to achieve a truly optimized sites.
