[IxDA Discuss] SEO and Usability

[Fred Beecher]

On 1/3/08, Mark Schraad <mschraad at mac.com> wrote:
>
> There is theory being preached within my company that if you optimize for
> search engines, then you are optimizing for the user as well. I
> disagree.


I agree with your disagreement, but I will add this. If you optimize for
humans, you will be optimizing for the search engines as well.

Because we're talking SEO here I feel I can safely make the assumption that
we're dealing with textual content. And we all know that the way humans deal
with textual content on the Web is by scanning for what's relevant to them.
So if we put the topic of a page or section (i.e., keyword) in the HTML
title tag or within H1, H2, etc. tags, that will call it out for the human
*as well as* the machine. It tells both the machine and the human that this
particular page or section is relevant to that keyword or idea. I would even
go so far as to say that SEO of this nature is an important part of user
experience design as a whole... because the user experience begins with
Google (or Yahoo or whatever) more often than not. If we're not optimizing
for humans, we're not doing our jobs.

Optimizing for the machine, on the other hand, leads to crappy, awkward
text, and if you ask me is toeing the line between blackhat and whitehat
techniques.

</soapbox>

F.