Have you ever seen a circus acrobat high up on a tightrope? There he is, 50 feet in the air and balancing on a unicycle. And he’s juggling 5 balls. If he leans too far to the left or to the right he goes toppling toward the floor.
Maintaining a website is a lot like that.
You have the constant balancing act between keeping the human visitors happy and keeping the search engines happy
The human visitors want lots of graphics and interactive tools. The search engines just care about text and HTML tags.
If you try to just keep the human visitors happy you may unintentionally leave out pieces the search engines need. If you just try to make the search engines happy, human visitors may not want to stick around.
This site helps you find and maintain that balance
To have a truly effective website, you need to make it friendly to both humans and search engines. Visitors are initially attracted to a site because of its appearance on the first page of search results. But once they click through to your site, there needs to be enough valuable substance to keep them there.
Fortunately, humans and search engines have something in common
Both of them appreciate great content. Great content, properly formatted, will help get your website to the first page of search results. Great content, well written, will keep your visitors on the site and reading more. When they spend more time on your site, the search engines consider your site more relevant.
So how do you keep humans and search engines happy?
That’s what this site will teach you. Here you’ll find resources to help you address all three elements of a great website: content, link building and usability. You’ll see that there are some basic rules for creating websites that have all three of these elements, and you’ll learn how to balance them all.
It may seem overwhelming at first
But don’t worry. You don’t have to understand everything about great websites right away. The acrobat on the high wire didn’t start his career 50 feet in the air. He first learned how to ride a unicycle on the ground. The he learned how to ride that unicycle on a wire just a few inches off the ground. Then he gradually raised the height of the tightrope. You see his performance at the circus, but you didn’t see the months of practice beforehand.
Working on a website is the same
You start with some basic elements and gain confidence in using them. Then you add in a new element and get comfortable with it. Over time, incorporating all the elements into new pages on your site becomes second nature. It just takes patience, practice and a willingness to keep learning.
This site breaks down website elements into small, tightly focused concepts
So pick one thing on your site you’d like to focus on and read those articles first. Then come back for another installment later. Or if you prefer, sign up for my weekly newsletter and I’ll send you my free report: The 10 Biggest Mistakes Owners Make on Their Websites.
Start reading here:
- SEO Strategies – ethical, tried-and-true strategies for improving your search visibility
- SEO Tools – free tools to help you put in all your SEO elements
- Usability – how to make a human-friendly website
- Website basics – a great place to start if you’re just learning about creating a website
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