Most often, you will find people confusing SEO with as many self-created and hear-say assumptions as they catch from I don’t know where. Though it is absolutely imprudent and hardly acceptable, yet some of us believe that SEO is about mounting a website with erroneously captivating means to attract visitors. That SEO, on the bases of some illusive methods, helps sites rank higher out there. And that SEO is meant for making things comfortable for search engines only. The worse, some SEO professionals are among ordinary people to believe this!

However, out of all these idiocies, one can be turned into a thinkable issue to bring to the surface something meaningful. Is search engine optimization done to optimize a website for search engines or for users? Or it is helpful for both?

What SEO aims at?

Search engine optimization should, keeping everything else aside, aim at improving web usability, I believe. Here, the users must be the first priority. After all, SEO is optimizing a website for people who use search engines. Once web usability is arrived at, things should go smooth for everyone on the web. Then web usability would automatically add to the convenience for both, searching people and search engines.

SEO should do it this way:

SEO professionals ought to understand that search engine optimization is a process that involves technical elements as well as human elements. They need to make usability testing their priority. The first thing to have a hard clutch on is how people search and why do they do it.  Second thing, it is vital for an individual SEO professional to give everything to what they specialize in. A programmer won’t make good info architecture, I guess.

Still we have to find out what sort of SEO job is capable of taking us near to web usability. The first prerequisite is dexterous labeling of website content. That means website content should be well systematized so that it can be found without too much fuss.

Another significant thing is to know which content you want search engines to find and which not. Make sure that search engines have intact access to desired content. Then it is equally important that search engines don’t have access to undesirable content. If they have, let it be limited. Last but not the least – have room for users’ navigation and information related objectives. That’s how they land where they wanted to, that too with expected stuff.

Google has been a matter of gossip for a couple of months, with people having so many issues. Sometimes it’s Google’s privacy policy and sometimes its failure to deliver related search results. For the most, users have been complaining about Google’s irrelevant results appearing on the screen.

So is it a reality that Google has really become incapable of providing you with desired search results? It’s quite tough to believe this, especially when Google has already introduced Panda update to boost the quality of search results. What is it that Google is facing so much of criticism due to?

Well, this time it’s not the “content farm discussion” that people are growing furious about. Now, you will see people arguing against “search plus your world” thing. If we are to believe what people put forth to support their complaints, excess of Google+ mixing is turning Google+ worse at showing relevant search results. That’s how a majority of internet users find it happening out there.

Recently, some users talked of some problematic video results on Google and most often we find no-quality results too. Though Yahoo and Bing are not better in this regard, yet they haven’t stuffed their search results with so much of Google+ material, at least.

Since providing users with best search results has been the priority of Google, now, assumptions have been made that Google doesn’t seem to be serious about it any more. And it no doubt chuckles every one when it’s known that Google is still working on it and is frequent at updating its algorithm!

We ought to observe the functionality of search engines first as a common user and then as a blogger or website owner. Then only we understand what problems users face while searching on the internet. As a user you might have noticed that sometimes your exact search queries end up fetching irrelevant pages for you. These irritating web pages are those that have too many ads on them.

Now Google decides to have a check on them with help of its page layout algorithm. This change has been done keeping users’ comfort in mind. Internet users were found complaining about unrelated results. They said that it was frustrating to not find the real content out of search results. Is it logical to place tons of ads instead of the content?

When can a page said to have too many ads?

When can we say that a webpage has extra ads on it? It’s simple – when you see the visibility of content affected by so many advertisements out there. The user navigates the whole page but it is quite difficult to find the actual content.

Such webpages have more ads and less content above the fold. Immediately after opening the webpage, ads are the only visible thing and the original content is missing. Most of the websites are in a habit of making their top section a hub of ads. Since these websites do well by doing it, this technique has been prevailing.

How effective the new algorithm would be?

There are some interesting facts about Google’s “page layout algorithm.” This new algorithm considers punishing ads-driven sites, especially those that have insufficient informative content above-the-fold. If your website big on advertisements, you may find traffic considerably affected. And that’s what the new algorithm does.

Interestingly, your entire site gets punished because of a particular page that’s heavily stuffed with ads. Not only that page is punished, but the ranking of the whole website could suffer. Then if you lessen ads at the top of your webpage in order to resume ranking, it will take time. So don’t take things for granted and be rational while displaying ads. Otherwise, your attempt to take advantage of advertising, on the contrary, could damage your online business and status.