Delivering a better customer experience could reduce your search engine ranking

[mandy]

Delivering a better customer experience could reduce your search engine ranking, but it may be worth it.

Those of us who rely on free listings on search portals like Google, Yahoo! or MSN have a problem. We want to create great, relevant and compelling pages for our prospects and our customers, and we want those pages to be listed by the search engines in order to get the content into the right people's hands. Unfortunately, we have limited and often contradictory information about what helps move us up the list, and about what might get us removed altogether, so the process of changing content in order to make it better is a risky proposition.

What the search engines tell us
Despite their best efforts, the portals regularly send our natural traffic to pages that are not the ones that we would choose. While we may like to change these natural search landing pages to improve the prospect experience, we are rightly fearful: If we change the page, will we lose our ranking? If we optimize the page for natural search traffic, will we get de-listed? 

full article: http://imediaconnection.com/content/13986.asp