The “Golden Rule” of SEO is to create content for users and not for search engines.
This is really key. The goal of search engines is to match content with user queries. By targeting the search engines specifically with content, you are missing the point of SEO.
It is actually not necessarily a positive thing if tons of people see your page. What you really want is a good match – a user that finds content that they are looking for.
If you design content for a search engine with excessive keywords and whatnot, readers are going to find that to be spammy and likely click away. This is definitely not beneficial for SEO purposes. Sure, it might give you a bump in the short-term because you might rank higher for a bit. But in the long term, if users aren’t finding what they are looking for and are leaving your site, you’ve got a problem. In the long-term, this will not positively impact your SEO at all but will instead lower it.
So – design and optimize pages with the end user in mind and not search engines. You’ll find much more benefit that way.
2 Responses
Definitely true, if you can’t keep people on the site then all the SEO is useless.
I love that you call it the “golden rule” of SEO. It forces us to keep people at the center of what we are doing in a career that can too quickly become sitting behind a screen and doing a lot of word engineering for what is essentially a robot.