When you write on the web, two audiences with slightly different needs have to be targeted: your site visitors and search engines.
What may look like a mere evidence at first sight, as search engines are supposed to put forward the pages which content is primarily targeted to their visitors, above all since the awakening of the Panda, then the Pinguin (and soon the Zebra too?), meets a real need.
A visitor of your page is looking for a specific piece of information. She will skim your textual content as she would do with a newspaper article. Hence, the same rules have to be applied on the screen as on paper.
The headline shows a sum up of the text, followed by an introduction that defines its context, paragraphs that detail each new argument, and a conclusion that rephrases the argumentation in a concise way. If a paragraph is too long, its first sentence sets the idea, and its last sums it up, while the paragraph body details or illustrates it.
A quick reading can be performed by reading both the introduction and the conclusion, as well as the first sentence of each (long enough) paragraph.
The presence of intercalary titles also helps the readers who scan through the page to directly go to the part that interests them.
However, when the information to show is a set of data pieces (surface and price of the square meter for an apartment, technical features of a camera…), a synthetic table presentation is an asset. The data is then directly accessible, and its comparison with other pages of the same site is made easier.
The search engine will give a certain weight to the different levels of titles. Then it will seek the highlighted content (start of page, bold, italic), giving it a relevance value of its own, and detect keywords and target expressions on the page. It is only then, that it will go through the whole textual content to determine keywords density and semantic fields.
A mere tabular presentation of data is for the search engine a list of keywords with no context at all. Its relevance value will thus be very low. Besides, these terms will likely be found on many sites (external duplication of the same data), and on many pages of the same site (internal duplicate content, for instance for the tables headers that will be the same on all your pages).
Writing at the same time for both your visitors and the search engines consists in meeting the needs of each target. The common denominator is thus to follow a hierarchical structure in the layout of the textual data. We cannot forget that different visitors will search for their information in different ways, depending on their present need and their habits. So it is useful to show the main information of your page in various ways: texts, tables, pictures, videos… Each way of presenting the data is at the same time redundant and complementary.
We can see on the following example taken from the site meilleursagents.com, how the same piece of data can be duplicated on the same page for the users to find it at a glance (table presentation) and for the search engines to assign it a semantic context (textual presentation).
Another example, which is closer to ergonomics concepts, is taken from the site translitteration.com where the visitor can choose the page language from a select menu (on the top of the page), and via a list of links (on the bottom of the page). In this case, the search engine (or rather its parser) can follow the links on the bottom of the page (but not in the select box), while the visitor can choose the navigation mode she prefers.
What may look like a mere evidence at first sight, as search engines are supposed to put forward the pages which content is primarily targeted to their visitors, above all since the awakening of the Panda, then the Pinguin (and soon the Zebra too?), meets a real need.
Writing for your visitors
A visitor of your page is looking for a specific piece of information. She will skim your textual content as she would do with a newspaper article. Hence, the same rules have to be applied on the screen as on paper.
The headline shows a sum up of the text, followed by an introduction that defines its context, paragraphs that detail each new argument, and a conclusion that rephrases the argumentation in a concise way. If a paragraph is too long, its first sentence sets the idea, and its last sums it up, while the paragraph body details or illustrates it.
A quick reading can be performed by reading both the introduction and the conclusion, as well as the first sentence of each (long enough) paragraph.
The presence of intercalary titles also helps the readers who scan through the page to directly go to the part that interests them.
However, when the information to show is a set of data pieces (surface and price of the square meter for an apartment, technical features of a camera…), a synthetic table presentation is an asset. The data is then directly accessible, and its comparison with other pages of the same site is made easier.
Writing for the search engines
The search engine will give a certain weight to the different levels of titles. Then it will seek the highlighted content (start of page, bold, italic), giving it a relevance value of its own, and detect keywords and target expressions on the page. It is only then, that it will go through the whole textual content to determine keywords density and semantic fields.
A mere tabular presentation of data is for the search engine a list of keywords with no context at all. Its relevance value will thus be very low. Besides, these terms will likely be found on many sites (external duplication of the same data), and on many pages of the same site (internal duplicate content, for instance for the tables headers that will be the same on all your pages).
Good practices
Writing at the same time for both your visitors and the search engines consists in meeting the needs of each target. The common denominator is thus to follow a hierarchical structure in the layout of the textual data. We cannot forget that different visitors will search for their information in different ways, depending on their present need and their habits. So it is useful to show the main information of your page in various ways: texts, tables, pictures, videos… Each way of presenting the data is at the same time redundant and complementary.
Examples
We can see on the following example taken from the site meilleursagents.com, how the same piece of data can be duplicated on the same page for the users to find it at a glance (table presentation) and for the search engines to assign it a semantic context (textual presentation).
Another example, which is closer to ergonomics concepts, is taken from the site translitteration.com where the visitor can choose the page language from a select menu (on the top of the page), and via a list of links (on the bottom of the page). In this case, the search engine (or rather its parser) can follow the links on the bottom of the page (but not in the select box), while the visitor can choose the navigation mode she prefers.
Écrire pour les utilisateurs et pour les moteurs de recherche (in French)
Escribir para los usuarios y para los motores de búsqueda (in Spanish)
Escrever para os usuários e para os motores de busca (in Portuguese)
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