"Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines."

The most important thing that affects your ranking on Google is how much people are satisfied by your webpages.

Webmasters who spend more time on their users and less time on "search engine optimization" tend to do better in the modern Google results. Here are a couple of tips that will help you improve your webpages immediately and are also ways of thinking about your users.

• Look at one of your webpages and really take the time to see it. Read it from the perspective of a user. Take the time to identify ways that the page can be better for the user.
• Is the page content clear? Is it well formatted? Does the page look trust worthy?
• Does the webpage offer other resources for the user? If you are trying to keep people on your website by not offering other resources you are hurting your users and you are hurting your ranking.
• Is there contact information? Author information? These things matter as trustworthy pages often have proud owners who like to tell them about themselves or their company.
• Go to other webpages about the same subject, see what others have said about the subject, see what good things and bad things are out there.
• Ask other people to look at your webpage and listen to what they have to say about it.

Many people roll their eyes when then hear Google advising them to "Make pages for users, not search engines". It seems a bit unrealistic that you can actually follow this advice since after all, you are making a webpage to be seen in search engines. But before you roll your eyes too much let's see what they mean by this.

A decision made for search engines instead of users

Okay let's say you have made a great article and it is on your site.

You receive some traffic, but you want more.

You begin thinking "Hey, I have heard that search engines like websites that have lots of pages. I have a great idea! I am going to take my article and split it up into three pages, then the search engines will like me better and I can also show more ads!"

Okay now you have three pages instead of one...

Guess what? This is alot less convenient for your users, and you most probably are getting less traffic than you were before from search engines.
This is often the result of such experiments, you are less useful to your visitors and you get less traffic.
The only reason you split those pages apart was because you wanted search engines to like you more or to show more ads. You did not follow this guideline.

Here is what you have done for users and search engines....

For Users - You have created unnecessary steps for your visitor to take because they now have to click "next page" just to get their information. This makes your page less enjoyable and less useful. Result? Less people will like your site or return to your site.

For Search Engines - You have diluted the content on your page. This makes each individual page have less useful content. Result? When someone searches for the topic of that article the search engines will no longer show your site because it has lost it's value. Instead of having one page that was doing okay in search engines, you now have three pages that are doing bad. What you should have done was to make the article better for your users by updating it or making it look better or adding great content.

The absolute best strategy to increase your rankings in Google is to be the best, most useful and most relevant site about the subject of your key words for your users.

The absolute worst strategy to increase your rankings in Google is to try to manipulate Google.

The above is true if you are a business seeking to have a responsible web presence. In other words if you are a store or a hotel or want to have a respectable name for your venture. I would be lying to you if I said that people aren't making money manipulating Google. The people who are manipulating Google will not have a lasting web presence but many enjoy short term profit.

The goal of my website is to explain the Google webmaster guidelines and offer advice about how to follow them. The people who will profit most from following these guidelines are the people who are making a web presence that they want to last long time.

Webmasters will do anything they can do to increase the rankings of their website. Seems natural doesn't it? Everyone wants more visitors from and better ranking in Google.

Often the actions a webmaster takes to do this are deceptive. While some of these actions work for a short time most will do more harm than good to your website and it's ranking in Google. Cloaking is one such action, but as we will illustrate there are many bad decisions made when you are not thinking of your users. I call this the dangerous part...

The dangerous part

What to do when you get to the dangerous part...

This is when the "make pages for users not search engines" comes in. You have a web page and want more traffic. What do you do next? Many of the decisions you make at this point will affect the direction and quite possibly the success or failure of you website. The best thing to do right now is to think about your users, not about search engines.

Google wants to give users the best choice of websites it possibly can, the ones that are most likely to be useful to those seeking the search query.

This guideline gives very good insight on how to create a quality web page and a responsible web presence. In fact, if you take this guideline to heart, many decisions that you have to make while building or while marketing your website become more clear.

When making decisions about your website it is always important to think "How will this affect my users?". If you are making decisions about your website thinking "How will this affect search engines?" then you may be concentrating on the wrong thing.