Website design is a tight balancing act for many companies. This balance falls between being human-friendly and pleasing the algorithms, so it gets in front of said humans. Depending on who built the website, it may skew one way or the other.
When people go looking for information, they want it to be easy to read. They want it to be easy to understand, and above all, they want it to feel like it was written for them. Humans also appreciate a pleasing visual layout, rather than a wall of text.
Now, the algorithms, on the other hand, can only interpret what is given to them. This means that the algorithms can only work with text, whether it is the body of a blog text or the alternative text on an image. Even with all of the text, algorithms rank based on keywords, rather than things like readability.
There must be a balance between the two requirements. The temptation to keyword stuff in order to please the algorithms would leave the text unreadable to people. Algorithms do not rank completely human-friendly text high enough to be found. The trick is to satisfy both requirements.
The skew, if there is one, should be towards being human-friendly. If people like content, they share it, and there isn’t a bit of algorithm in that action. It’s easier to write the first draft without considering the technical aspects of algorithms. That way, the item comes out pretty readable.
A first draft can then be tweaked to meet most of the algorithmic requirements. These changes include checking word densities, adding keywords to any images, and minor alterations to increase the Flesch reading score. After that, it’s simply a matter of distributing the new content out and tracking what happens. After all, data allows for improvement!
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