Before working on Search Engine Optimization (SEO); I have always believed that great web page looks will attract more visitors and thus, design goes in par with content. Guess what, I was wrong! Even with great design, what is the use if nobody could actually find our web pages? All of a sudden, it hit me, what was the thing that bring visitor to our pages?? You guessed it right!! Most of the times, it's the search engines and their cute little spiders that inform visitors about our pages. That is why on page SEO is extremely important.

Previously, layout and site design have always been the thing that I am concerned about. Thus adding cute graphics, scripts and all other things that will make the site look pretty and eye catching to the visitors became my priority. Well, one thing for sure, both humans and spiders love contents more than anything else, be it site design, cute layout, appealing animation, etc. (surely that does not mean we can slap a bright yellow text on top of a white background!!)

Difference between spiders and humans

Although both are visiting your website, there are differences in how each creatures (spiders and humans) view, interpret, and evaluate your site.

Visitors (human in this case) will see your site, marvel at your site design for 5 seconds (as I said earlier, slapping yellow text on top of a white background or colorful background will just make them leave in an instant), and start looking at your content. In your content itself, they will try to get valuable information and if they do not find any, they will leave in that given second (there's a reason the internet is called information superhighway).

While spiders on the other hand, will look at your texts (readable part of your pages straight away). If you put images, it will read the tags and the description contained in the image tags. It will not be thrilled with your state-of-the-art web design (including all the fancy graphics and scripts that make your pointer shines) but instead will skip to the content.

This means you as the webmaster, has to be able to provide these little spiders with content that they want so they can arrange it properly for future searches and at the same time you have to entertain human readers so they don't run away after seeing your layout and designs.

To support spiders - but not forgetting human reader

Here are some tactics that you can try to implement in your website to make the spiders perform their best and at the same time keeping the human counterpart.

1. Reducing scripts clutter in the page. A perfect example of script clutter is a dropdown menu bar which is created using javascript. This menu will normally take precedence and is located right under head tag of the page. Instead of inserting the whole chunk of the code at the beginning of the page, put it at the bottom of the page and call it up above.
2. Tag your pictures. In order to let the spiders perform well, make sure you tag your pictures with relevant names that depict the content of your page and your image.
3. Use reasonable amount of headings to separate a huge chunk of content. This does not only help the spiders to recognize the content of the pages but also helps human readers to process big amount of information

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