From the course: Danny Sullivan on SEO

Avoid a common pitfall

From the course: Danny Sullivan on SEO

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Avoid a common pitfall

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- SEO stands for search engine optimization which means you're optimizing for search engines, but what can get lost in that is the search engines themselves are trying to optimize their results for human beings. So people will hear that I should do some technical thing or some content thing to please the search engines, and then they can go down a trap where they do stuff too much for the search engines that they lose track about why the search engines will want certain things done in a certain way. And that is that they want to do things that mimic or that imitate what a human being likes. A search engine wants good content. Not because the search engine itself likes good content, but because human beings like good content. The search engine wants to reward mobile friendly pages. Not because the search engine has problems on mobile devices, but because humans have problems on mobile devices and want human friendly pages. Virtually all the things you will hear about an SEO, that are recommended as things that you should do, those are things that are meant not because of your search engine visitors, the crawlers and the automated tools that are coming in, but they're really meant to kind of reward and mimic and help the human visitors that are coming to your site. And that the search engine wants to make sure that they are putting out pages that the human beings coming to them and then leaving are going to be happy with when they arrive at 'em.

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