Search engine optimisation can only get your so far. Of course traffic to your site is one of the most important things in internet marketing however it is not the only important thing. You can have the best rankings in the world, however without a good website these rankings can mean very little. At this point it is important to highlight the fact that by a good website I am not talking about pretty images and colours (although this still helps), by good a website I am talking about clear internal linking structures, credibility, trustworthiness, and providing the right content/information to a user.

I felt compelled to write this post for two reasons. The first reason was in reading a blog about Google’s Avinash Kaushik saying that measuring clicks is for idiots, bounce rates are it posted on the Search Engine Watch almost two weeks back. Kaushick drew some criticism for this rather harsh declaration however what he is saying is true. The focus here isn’t so much clicks but instead about good common sense web design.

Content is key for a successful SEO campaign as we all know. As SEOs we can find a way to get good content onto a site (and boy do we find ways) in order to improve the relevancy for the search engines on what a site is about. However if your site fails to deliver on some fundamentals like good clear navigation, trustworthiness, high relevancy, then I’m afraid that the rankings that you have fought so hard to achieve are ultimately not doing you a lot of good and this is what Kayshik was getting at.

Now when I first read this I thought to myself that it is a pretty obvious thing, I mean if you are ranking highly for a keyword then your site must be highly relevant otherwise the search engines wouldn’t be ranking you so highly right? Well it would appear not, and this is where my second reason for writing a blog on this comes from.

We have many clients who are adamant that certain keywords are to be targeted when their site has very little clear information to offer the user and due to this they click straight off. SEOs to a certain extent are forced to play the hand they are dealt, we will make the most out of what we have when optimising and will try our very best to get the keywords onto a page as much as possible in the most natural way possible. However this can only take your site so far.

Time and time again I have come across sites in which are being optimised for a certain keyword when in fact the site has very little obvious relevancy. By obvious relevancy I mean whereby the user can see immediately what they are looking for within seconds of clicking on the page. By obvious relevancy I do not mean a paragraph or two of text that contains keywords and very little else just purely to get the keywords onto the site. The user shouldn’t have to hunt for what they want to see and more often than not they don’t.

So when you choose your keywords think logically. If you want your site to rank highly for a certain keyword you have to think to yourself whether your site provides enough information to the user that entered the search query and clicked through onto your site. If it does not then you should either change the keyword you are targeting or change some areas of your site to better accommodate the keyword.

Of course it is not always this easy. You may not be able to easily change your site. This is okay as there are some simple ways around this. Firstly if your homepage is not the most relevant for a particular keyword then perhaps target your landing pages instead. If you still want to target your homepage then put keyword anchor text links to the landing pages that display more information thus improving the internal link structure. This is a good technique as it helps with content that SEOs put on a page and also the optimisation of the keyword for that particular page. Secondly keep any content you put on your site interesting so that people are likely to spend more time on it. Make sure spelling and punctuation is accurate also as failure to do this can make your site appear sloppy. Another point (and this applies to ecommerce sites) is to draw attention to any sale items or new items you may have. Lastly another way that has proved to help lower bounce rate is by reducing the load time of your site - so all those pretty images and flash banners/intros that you thought made your site look good in fact can have an adverse effect on your sites bounce rate.

This should help you to think a bit differently about your how to market your site. There are more ways of improving bounce rate and there are many posts on this matter if you were to search the web. However remember that yes you can get keywords strategically mentioned throughout the site and yes this may even be enough to get your ranked well. However a page really needs to be clear and give the user exactly what they want further highlighting that trusted SEO rule of thumb – optimise for the user and not the search engines.

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Google, Search Engine Optimisation