What Search Engines Want. And Don’t Want.

It is not a tough task to find out what search engines are looking for. Or for that matter, what offends them and brings out a bad review from them! To understand the workings and preferences of the search engine crawlers, let’s first look at what they want:

• Excellent Content: There is no substitute for quality content. That includes smart web designing and content writing. You can have any amount of SEO done, but unless you click on this point, your website is not taking off.
• Usability: Search engines are sold on a website’s usability. You can also call it user experience. Search engines look at the website in terms of the user’s perspective. Is your website easily navigable? Are the web pages unique in their title tags and meta descriptions? What is the bounce rate of your website? Answer these questions yourself and you will have a great website!
• Performance: Websites that take a lot of time to upload or is based on shaky platforms find the thumbs-down from search engines
• Credibility: How much of credibility and authority you have as a website counts a lot for search engines. If you are an established and reputed presence in your domain and your website is used as references for information in other websites, you have the search engine as your friend!

Moving on, take a quick look at what search engines don’t want:

• Keyword Manipulation: You cannot fool the search engine crawlers by manipulating keywords. Remember, most of your keyword ideas are coming from Google itself, through one source or the other! Avoid keyword stuffing in your content and on-page SEO.
• Paid Links: If you are paying for web links as part of your link building strategy, it’s time to think again! Sophisticated search engine algorithms and crawlers will see through your game sooner rather than later.
• Poor Usability: This is the worst curse of them all! A website that is not user-friendly is as good as not there at all. You need to bolster your website’s navigation and create unique identities for your web pages. Also, adding URLs with a logical convention will help you immensely.