Making Your Site User Friendly

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Many website owners concentrate on making their site easy to crawl by the search engine robots in an attempt to gain higher search engine rankings. Most of the time the end result is a lower than expected ranking from the search engines.

The reason this happens is because the search engine algorithm is designed to also calculate a website's human usefulness, as well as its SEO ranking elements. While making sure that your website is built to meet the minimum SEO standards, it is also important to make your site content friendly and useful to human readers.

In the old days, webmasters only concerned themselves with making their site's pages easy to crawl and index by search engine robots, and this was accomplished by creating high keyword density for the content on their pages and titles. This technique worked for quite a while until it was found that any site could use this technique to gain prominence on the SERPs without having relevant content.

Today content is king, and in order to achieve high search engine rankings on the major search engines, your site must have relevant and useful content that is designed for human readers. It is not enough that your site has many pages of relevant content. To gain top 10 contention on the major search engines your site's content must be presented to your visitors in a meaningful and useful manner.

One of the easiest ways to maximize the presentation of content to your site visitors is to use an index sidebar on your site. This sidebar could be used to replace your existing navigation menu, or could be simply used to enhance your site's current menu system. Your new sidebar should display text headings and sub-headings based on relevant keywords, and use descriptive keyword phrases in the hyperlinks to your content. This method can also be used to link to specific paragraphs or places within your pages.

Another simple way to make your site's content more useful and accessible to your visitors is to use a "Category Cloud" script that will display relevant keyword based topics and phases that shows descriptions when hovered over. The category cloud is quite popular in social networking sites, but can easily be integrated into static page sites as well.

You may also consider adding a search script into your site that will allow your visitors to search for content using their own words. There are many search scripts available that can easily add more usefulness to your site in a matter of minutes.