[IxDA Discuss] SEO and Usability

[Fred Beecher]

On Fri, 4 Jan 2008 07:29:53, dave malouf <dave at ixda.org> wrote:
>
> I'm not an SEO expert by any means, but reading all this talk about
> how CSS will effect SEO results really SCREAMS to me my point that
> designing for SEO is a flawed methodology for total success. It seems
> the Search Engines actually need to optimize for the real world more
> than we need to optimize for them.



I don't think anyone here is saying that SEO-focused design is good design.
I certainly agree with you that it is not. What we're saying is that
designing and structuring content for human relevance will have the side
effect of also being highly relevant to search engines.


While the search engines aren't perfect, Google at least does a very good
job of mimicking how humans determine relevance, which leads to good,
relevant search results for users. If you have two Web pages that talk about
the same topic but are structured differently, both humans and search
engines will judge them differently. The page that has the topic in the
title, subtopics in headers, and uses consistent terminology will be easier
for humans to read and comprehend compared to the page that is unstructured
and inconsistent. Similarly, a search engine will rank the structured &
consistent page higher than the unstructured & inconsistent page. So it's
happy times for everyone, human and machine alike. : )


Where the imperfections of search engines come through is where the blackhat
SEO folks get their bread and butter... keyword stuffing, duplicate content,
etc... Google's getting smarter about that sort of thing, though, and people
are getting penalized in the rankings for pulling that kind of crap. I am
*very* against that stuff. I wouldn't even call that SEO... hell, I'd call
it cheating.

I am now officially throwing my cap in the wing of anti-SEO.
>
> Fortunately designing hardware and embedded software means this
> doesn't really effect me to much ... ;)



Heh... This is more a Web IA problem than a pure IxD problem, so that's
definitely true. : )

- Fred