It may seem obvious to say, but people and search engines are a website’s most important visitors and generally most websites need both.

But how well is your web site optimized for either of them ?

For a web site to succeed it needs to cater effectively to search engines and people and since they are both seeking very different things it can be difficult to achieve.

Designing a website to cater to search engines is normally referred to as SEO or Search Engine Optimization and designing a web site for people is generally just referred to as web site design. Designing a web site to cater to both is generally referred to as web site optimization.

The task of web site optimization can also encompass web page optimisation although it is possible to do web site optimization without doing much by way of web page optimisation.

The main factors that interest a search engine are:-

• Important things to avoid: All the major search engines do NOT like mininets, link farms, hidden page text, keyword stuffing and duplicate content on the same site. In addition Google does not like paid for links.
• Age of domain: The age of a domain name and how long it is currently registered for is important to Google especially for competitive keywords. These factors are however less important to MSN or Yahoo.
• Site & page coding: Search engines live to consume text and that’s their main interest. They can’t read text in images and only Google has a limited capability to read text content in Flash movies. The html page coding for a page should be kept to a minimum and placed whenever possible below the text content. This makes the page code more search engine friendly.
• Page & site theme: The pages on a site have a theme determined by the page content and the links to the page. The themes of individual pages and the way they are linked together will determine the theme of the site as a whole. A consistent theme throughout a site enables a search engine to gain a clearer picture of what the site is about leading to better and more consistent rankings.
• Meta tags & compatibility: The only tag of real interest to search engines is the title tag which for the most important search engine Google, should be compatible with its requirements to be no more than 65 characters. Google does read and analyze titles containing more than 1,100 characters, but doesn’t display them. While Yahoo still has an interest in keyword meta tags, MSN and Google have no interest in them at all.
• External linking: The quality and quantity of incoming links has increased in importance, particularly with Google. Quality links are those that come from sites already well established and regarded by the search engines and in a related niche to the site being linked to. The link text is also of high importance in ranking the page.
• Page title and description: A unique page title and description the search engines can use for a listing in the search results, preferably using at least one main keyword phrase. For Google only the first 65 characters of the title and the first 155 characters of any description will be displayed in the search results. Pages with duplicate titles on the same web site are often not indexed, especially with Google. This can be a problem for shopping catalogue sites whose pages are generated with the same titles.

There are of course many more factors of interest to a search engine than just the ones presented here. However, these represent the key factors that have been established not just from my own experience but also from that of others in the search engine community.

In the sequel article to this one are the factors that are of most interest to people visiting a web site. Such factors include among others, visual appearance, visitor first impressions, the clarity of the marketing message, how quickly visitors find what they are looking for, page and site navigation, the offer experience and page download speed.

The relative importance of factors for people visiting a web site has much more to do with human psychology. The focus of web site design and web site optimization is therefore completely different to that for search engines and requires a different set of skills.

Try our FREE web site optimization evaluation to see what a search engine makes of your site.

About the Author: Tony Simpson writes frequently on web design and web page optimisation and provides a range of web site optimization service designed to increase site revenue.