Do you write content for people or search engines?

Write the pages with your visitors in mind first, weave your keywords into your text and sales copy in a way that makes sense to the reader but also allows you to maximise the presence of your keywords to raise their prominence. People will look at your site visually while search engines will index your site textually, with a bit of careful thinking and planning you should be able to please both

All search engines are trying to serve up to their visitors the most accurate and quality derived searches they can, so make sure your keywords match your sites theme and that you pack as much useful and relevant information into your site as possible

How much visitor traffic should you be aiming for

That depends on what sort of increased traffic you want, is your web site going to make its money from selling unique products or from selling advertising space. If your selling unique products then low targeted traffic is better than high non-targetted traffic e.g. 500 visitors and 50 sales is better than 5000 visitors and 5 sales

If your selling advertising space then high page views will be important and getting as many visitors as you can to view as many pages of your web site would be your aim, regardless of how un-targeted the visitors are

Most people however are looking for targeted visitors, the kind of people who are genuinely interested in what your site has to offer, the type who want to buy your products or services. Focus the theme of your site and target the keywords you use in your site to match the ones your target visitors would type in

Search directories and search engines

There is a fundamental difference between search directories and search engines. Directories are usually edited by humans, submit your URL and a person will actually look at your site to see if it meets their criteria, one of the best known directories being Yahoo. Search engines on the other hand are computer driven, they autonomously spider the web collecting information about web sites which is then added to a database that searchers can interrogate

In order to get top positions in the key search engines you need to familiarise yourself with what they look for and the way they operate. The Internet is awash with search engine robots (also known as spiders) frantically indexing the web, but they don't all operate in the same way

There are search engines that read meta tags and those that do not. Some will read the alt attribute of an image tag, some will not. There are those that spider your whole site and cache relevant pages for their search function and yes, those that do not

So how should you proceed

The first thing you should be looking at is keywords, the ones that people are typing in to search engines to find the type of products or services you are selling, this is important as target the wrong keywords and your ultimate sales will suffer

choosing Keywords for maximum visitor traffic