I want to use this post to address a prevalent misconception. Many people, as they begin to optimize their website, tend to perceive this process as somewhat contradictory with the rest of the work they’ve put in with the product and potential users in mind. In fact, the work they invest in their website is divided between work optimizing for users and work optimizing for Google – when in fact these two are almost one and the same.

Google and you have the same agenda

Google wants to know what your website is about – so do we. Think of your new free Flash website as a well written essay. You’d have to ask yourself first what the essay is about and if you can’t summarize this concept in a sentence, you aren’t doing your job well. What is your website about? Is it about selling t-shirts? Is it a business website for a dentist’s office? Is it your band’s fan page? Make sure this message is clear and comes across fast. There were over 183 million websites on the internet as of early 2009 and this number just keeps growing. If a visitor reaches your website and doesn’t know what it’s about he has no reason to stay. It takes a lot less time to click your mouse than it does to walk out of a store.

Google has the same agenda. It wants to be able to give the best search results and this depends very much on how you present your website. It uses algorithms that are meant to discover your website’s purpose and subject. That’s why it reads the titles and gives them precedence over other types of texts. That’s why the description is so important. That’s why it crawls the links leading to your website to understand what subjects are relevant to your website. If you’re website’s message is clear to Google, it will most likely be clear to an actual human visitor.

Define your website’s message clearly

Many people have searched and found ways to outmaneuver Google’s algorithms and get their website listed on the first page. However, Google continuously updates its algorithms and these websites don’t last very long. Spamming is basically a waste of time at the end of the day. You aren’t serving your users/visitors by offering them low-quality content, and you aren’t going to get very far with Google either. Playing the game however, may be a little harder and more complex, but it will improve the quality of your website and get you the right kind of traffic.

So make sure you define your message clearly. Notice our header: ‘Learn. Optimize. Get Your Wix Ranked’. Bing.  You know exactly what this blog is about. So does Google.

Are you being Google friendly?

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…