Human Beings & Bots- Getting The Balance Right
If you only do five things to your website, checking your content should definitely be one of them!
Call them site traffic, visitors, or customers, but human beings are one half of the balance that your website homepage needs to achieve in order to work successfully. Humans have specific needs- when they arrive at a website, they expect to find the information they’re searching for within seconds, especially if they’re experienced internet users. Ultimately, they’re your customers, and you need to provide the information they need about the products and services that they could potentially buy from your site. You need to be clear and concise with what you provide, but equally don’t fill the page with lots of superfluous information.
When writing the text for your website, look at it critically, and encourage other people to do so too. It's all very easy to write text using keywords and search terms to attract search engines, which will attract traffic - but it's the wrong kind of traffic and won't stay around for very long. You are aiming to sell products and services to humans not search engines, bots and the other faceless mechanical beings of the internet. They are an important factor to be considered of course, but its important that you prioritise here- your text must make sense to human beings above anything else.
When writing text for your own website, it can be all too easy to select keywords relevant to your website and build them into minimal sentences on each page with little effort, and as mentioned above, although they may provide you with a lot of traffic, you are unlikely to see an improvement in your sales - simply because it wasn't a human who clicked on your site or if a human visitor did click on your site chances are they will leave almost instantly.
You will probably end up with a lot of traffic in the 0-10 second range, which are usually non-human or disappointed visitors. The text won’t appeal to the humans and they’ll leave the site, which means you’ve missed out on those potential customers and their enquiries and sales, also known in Search Engine Land as ‘conversions.’
If a human was unfortunate enough to click upon your site filled with unimaginative, uninformative information, chances are that they clicked the dreaded 'back' button and left immediately - as a rule of thumb, most surfers will stay for less than ten seconds trying to find the information that they need. Like picking up a newspaper where the headline catches your attention and makes you want to read on, you'll need to grab the readers' attention within the first sentence. Give them the information that was promised within your description and a little bit more too. Keep the tone positive and in keeping with the 'image' of your company.
Now for the technical science bit! As well as ensuring that the text on your homepage, and indeed the rest of your site, is suitable for human consumption, you also have to consider the bots to. Bots are the mechanical beings which file your site with the search engines- if you’ve been reading our 101 Marketing Tips so far, you’ll know exactly what they are- but if not, in a nutshell, these little critters are the equivalent of virtual secretaries- they index your site content, selecting page titles, subtitles, keywords and images and report their findings. Their findings equal how far up or down the rankings the search engine lists your site.
Concentrate firstly on making your homepage the first entry point for your website- once you have sorted this out, it makes coordinating all of your other pages as entry points a lot easier. But firstly, let’s start from the homepage and work from there. If you’ve been paying attention to our previous marketing tips, you’ll know how important relevant keywords and meta data is (If not, you definitely need to read Keyword Research and HTML Page Titles at the very least). These are the sugar lumps that encourage hungry bots to visit and list your site above other sites with fewer relevancies.
To illustrate what we mean here, go to Google.co.uk and run a search. To demonstrate, we’ve used the website Carp Baits Online. We went to Google, type in ‘Carp Bait suppliers’ and when the site appears, click ‘cached’. This will show you the website in question, and highlight any of the words that you used in your search term wherever they have been used on that webpage. If you click on the image below, you'll see exactly what we mean.
Look at how the highlighted words have been used- this is a brilliant example of writing for human visitors to your website as well as search engines, as each highlighted word is in a relevant sentence, and as opposed to employing some of the more immoral techniques used on classic spam sites (Check out our Spammy Text Marketing Tip), this homepage still provides a good amount of clear, concise information.
Some companies often make the mistake of employing a website design which allows for very little text to be incorporated onto the home page, and as you can see, by looking at our cached example, the lack of text in your design directly affects how search engines will read the site. Bear in mind too that Google images will also crawl your site and if you would prefer your images not to be re-used by other websites you will need to watermark them, so ensure your alt. text is honest and accurate, and not stuffed with spam. You can however, use maybe one or two keywords if they describe the content, but bear in mind that alt text is there to help people who are partially or totally blind, they certainly don't want your spam. They just want to know what's in the picture.
So when it comes to checking on your content, it’s essential that you get the balance between writing for both humans and bots just right. Too much superfluous information, or too many keywords with no information put of potential customers. Sites that incorporate flashy designs with minimal texts or that possess very little information, put off the bots. Get the balance just right, and you’ll attract both with ease, and hopefully make yourself some tidy profits too. Search Engine Optimisation experts say ‘Content is King’ a lot, and they’re right. Without using those juicy keywords properly, you won’t attract the traffic that you and your website need to exist successfully.
