Keep your site user-friendly.Think in terms of the design elements that users like and
don’t like. And if you don’t know what those are, do some research, because plenty of studies
have been done. Among design elements that aren’t likely to gain you any love from your
users are Flash pages, frames, and difficult or changing navigational structures. Crawlers
don’t like these any more than users do. When you’re designing your site, consider using
a focus group to help you design the site in a way that users will be comfortable with. And
if users are comfortable with it, crawlers probably will be, too.
Don’t obsess over where your page ranks in search results.Yes, you want to have your
web site featured as high in search engine rankings as possible, but not at the expense of
everything else you should do to get your site in front of the right customers. Obsessing
over your rank leads to pouring too much time and money into making a search engine
happy. It’s a much better practice to obsess over giving your users what they need and
building loyal users.Spam of any kind is bad. And no one wants to be labeled a spammer. But being labeled as SEO spam
is probably one of the most detrimental blows that your web site can suffer. So instead of focusing on
how you can make search engines like your site, focus on how you can make users like your site, and
search engines will naturally follow the users.245
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