Seo arrow Make pages for users

person with a heart

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

- from the Google webmaster guidelines

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

In our rush to create websites with perfect onpage SEO and great keywords, etc. we forget that we are making pages for people, not search engines.

You have likely been researching search engine optimization and have read scores of blogs advising this or that to rank higher. The time and effort you have put into learning about search engines will not do you any good if people do not like your website.

It is time to really think about people, not search engines.

People understand if a webpage is beautiful, professional looking, well written and so on. The more presentable a webpage is the more likely it will be enjoyed by people. Don't forget people.

Virtually any improvement to your webpages made for your users will have clear and long term positive effects.

How to improve your site for users

Here are the types of things you should be doing to make your blog or website better

You may have been told a million things about SEO or marketing a webpage, but the reality is that people have to enjoy your site for it to rank well. Webmasters who spend more time on their users and less time on "search engine optimization" tend to do better in the modern Google results.

The best way to please Google is to first please your users.

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.

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

The absolute best strategy to increase your rankings in Google is to be the most useful, most relevant, most informative and most pleasurable site for your users.


Patrick Sextonby Patrick Sexton

Make pages for users, not search engines