For the second time in as many days I got asked a question by a well-minded business owner that I thought was common knowledge. Apparently not! Here’s a paraphrased version…

“So when you create optimized pages for my site, will my site visitors be able to see them?”

The first time I heard the question, I chalked it up to just a case of not quite understanding SEO and I went into education mode. The second time I heard almost the exact same question, I decided that there is some bad info out there, and it requires mass correction!

There are many aspects of SEO – actually too many to list. But some common areas that need attention are internal link structure, directory structure, backlinks, domain redirects, dynamic content handling, robots meta tag, and on and on. Even through the haze of technical issues, there are some clear fundamentals that should drive every SEO strategy:

-Building high quality content
-Establishing subject-matter expertness
-Building high quality content
-Establishing subject-matter expertness

I have listed these in order of importance. These four, err, two things should be the core to all of the more technical, satellite issues. If high quality, credible content is not in place, a perfectly structured site won’t get much attention from bots and certainly won’t get any backlink attention. If bots don’t care, and you get no testimonial value from relevant backlinks, all of the expert structure in the world won’t matter.

From a practical standpoint, what good is compelling site content if nobody can see it? The idea is to accomplish two things: First, build site pages that appear to a search bot to be unmistakably about a specific topic. Second, build site pages that appear to a user to be unmistakably about a specific topic. Seems redundant, but by building high quality content, you satisfy the users and the bots.

By providing a user exactly what they want right at the second that they want it, vis a vis a well constructed content page, you will increase conversion and increase the likelihood that the page will be ranked. It’s all tied together, but SEO hinges on great content.

First and foremost, users have to be able to see the content!

I forgot to mention… Hiding pages from users, but displaying them to a bot is very spammy and bad. Please never do this, or allow a less-than-scrupulous SEO to do this to your site.

Start with great content and build SEO-friendly structure around it…that users can see.