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Does it really make a difference whether or not you optimize your web pages for search engines? Do you really need to bother with finding good search-engine-friendly keywords, filling in your keywords meta tags, or creating human-readable URLs?

It's easy to do a simple experiment to see if a little web page optimization helps bring people to your web site. In fact, let's do that experiment right here, right now!

This web page comes in two flavours, one that has been optimized for search engines and one that has not been optimized for search engines.

You are currently reading the optimized version.  To find the other version, use a search engine! Read more about search engine optimization.

How I optimized my web page

For the page that has been optimized for search engines, I have made the changes noted below. (Not all the changes are visible, you may need to inspect the page source to see them all, e.g. the changes to the Description and Keywords meta tags.)

1. The page URL has been made human-readable and now includes some more keywords for SEO.
2. Description and Keywords meta tags have been added to the page. Not all search engines read these tags, but in my experience they can help a lot with SEO.
3. The image has a human-readable filename, and includes more SEO keywords.
4. The image has an Alt tag containing relevant keywords.
5. Some of the main keywords in the text have been rendered in bold, which increases their significance to search engines.
6. The subtitle has been made into a proper level 2 heading. Search engines love headings!
7. Some extra keyword combinations have been added into the text. I've simply added a few more keyword-heavy phrases like "for search engines" where it was possible to do so without spoiling the flow of the text.
8. Users are allowed to add comments to the optimized page.

The original version of this search engine optimization (SEO) article took about one hour to write. Later, it took about fifteen minutes to make this optimized version.

Well, did this web page optimization for search engines pay dividends? The following table shows the total number of times the two different web pages have been read in total: