SEO vs. UO
My site’s redesign should be a good opportunity to add my first rant to my developer blog. A rant about a trend I’ve noticed lately, called Search Engine Optimalisation, or SEO. Of course, this isn’t a new phenomenon. It’s probably as old as search engines themselves. Nevertheless, the last couple of months I came across this subject a bit too often.
When I was at @Media in London this year, a fair amount of questions was asked about SEO. But it’s not just developers who worry about it anymore. More and more, clients think that something special has to be done to their sites in order to optimise them for search engines like Google. They turn to the developers or to someone who actually specialises in SEO. Then the site is altered or built with this in mind. The site is optimised for search engines.
But isn’t this the wrong approach? Shouldn’t we be optimising for our users instead? Something like User Optimalisation (UO)? Luckily, one excellent method for optimalisation appears to benefit both: building with Web Standards. But I reckon it is wrong to assume that all measures taken to improve the “findability” of a website will also benefit its users. Therefore, I think it’s necessary to get priorities straight and turn some thought processes around.
A client might think that as soon as their site appears on the first search result page of Google, more visitors will come and use their site. Google first, users later. Let’s turn this around. If you build an accessible website with great content, more users will gradually use your site, maybe even link to it. This will eventually lead to a higher page rank; because people are already using it. Worry about users first, Google later, if at all.
Search engines, after all, are companies with their own agenda, who can change their algorithms any time they want. That pretty much rules out any SEO certainties. If we forget that our main priority should be our human users, we risk going back to the dark ages of dozens of meaningless meta tags, huge amounts of keywords on the bottom of pages or maybe even putting random numbers in URLs.
Comments
Congratulations on the redesign. Love tha Palatino headlines. :) Good article too. Very true.
Well, seo is dying. SMO is coming next..