Who do we need to target when building a website? Is it the crawlers or is it the human visitors? Nowadays, for the sake of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), many webmasters tend to make the mistake of prioritising the over human targets.

It goes without saying that the purpose of a website is to provide information to a person and not to a crawler. No matter how appealing your site is to search engines, if it does not meet the needs of your visitors, all your SEO efforts will be rendered useless.

While it is true that a large percentage of internet users make use of search engines, a website that is wholly structured only for search engines will not get the full interest and loyalty of those people who can find it. Hence, their visit to the search engine friendly site will be meaningless. Return visitors and customers contribute greatly to the success of any web site and if all the pieces of information on your site are only geared towards crawlers, please do not expect any return visitors.

If webmasters keep on generating search engine friendly keywords without considering the quality of content—content should be informative, interesting and captivating—they will certainly lose visitors who are after a quality service. To avoid losing visitors, webmasters should keep in mind to build a website and create contents that can be helpful to people. If people start noticing that you generate informative contents, they will see to it to always visit your site, hence, the traffic explosion.

SEO is not just about structuring a website based on what crawlers want. It is about giving people what they need. If you are able to create a website which naturally attracts many visitors, you website will move up the search engine rankings effortlessly.

Ergo, to create a successful website, build it for humans and not for search engines. Humans, after all, have the ultimate control whether or not your web site will achieve a successful ranking.