No one will argue with the desire of website owners to attract
large numbers of viewers to their sites. But this desire has
spawned an entire industry of people claiming to be able to
provide website owners with the holy grail of search engine
optimization: making it to the top spot in an organic search on
your favorite search engine.
Not everyone willing to pay for an S.E.O. expert to optimize
his or her site can be number one in an organic search. And of
course there is the issue of paid search placement that trumps
organic searches.
As fast as search engine optimization experts develop ways to
beat the search engines, the experts at the search engines
change their algorithms, and my money is on the guys at Google.
When it comes to search engine optimization consider the
following important issues and questions:
- Do the search engine tactics employed on your site degrade,
obscure, or in some way diminish the ability of your website
visitors to quickly find the information they want? - Do these search engine tactics impede your ability to
effectively deliver your marketing message in a way that
attracts attention, triggers relevant sensory experience, and
embeds your message in your visitors’ memories? - Do tactics like outbound reciprocal links and inline
body-text links send people away from your site when you want
them to stick around and hear what you have to say? - Do you have excessive repetitive copy-text on your site
aimed at being indexed by search engines rather than read by
people for clear concise understanding? - Have you reduced your complex message or instructions to a
series of bulleted points that confuse rather than clarify? - Do your search engine tactics concentrate on the volume of
traffic rather than the quality? - Is the traffic you’re attracting leaving your site as fast
as it’s arriving?
The lesson we should learn from SenEx Design concepts is that
websites need to be designed for people not search engines.
Delivering a clearly understandable marketing message is
achieved by tapping into the psychological and emotional
responses triggered by sensory experiences. That is how you
need to communicate to an audience separated from you by the
vast expanse of the Internet.
