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..
I think you raise a valid point.
However, I should say that good SEOs optimize for people (findability, usability, conversion optimization etc) first and for search engines second. It shouldn’t be a one sided deal, there’s (much) more then SEO. Advisers/agency’s offering only SEO are a bad choice in my opinion.
I absolutely agree! I think your idea of UO is spot on!
I have this one old client (one of my first) who refuses to take my advice about using us to do some enhanced SEO, and instead, he keeps finding “SEO wizards” online - you know the companies who only offer SEO like Damien mentions, or at least offer SEO first, maybe throw in a bit of ‘web design’ later - and letting them mess the site up with unstyled headers (even though we already have headers in there) and blocks of unreadable text (again unstyled) jammed with ‘keywords’. It drives me insane!
What we offer, we’ve called ‘holistic SEO’ - i.e. we build the site with web standards, semantic HTML etc - and let nature take its course.
Another thing that SEO cowboys do that drives me crazy - make the name of their business link back to the homepage any time they mention it on the website, including on the homepage itself…. WTF?!!
Good points.
But you don’t have to have one or the other. Usable designs should lend themselves to “Holistic” SEO standards. And SEO shouldn’t be so tyrannical as to demand less than usable design. One without the other is only half a solution.
I’ve had to argue both sides. To designers who feel their “vision” shouldn’t have to bear the burden of trollish SEO standards, to programmers who treat the idea of “usability” and “branding” and “vision” as though it were a snotty tissue.
So if you, as a designer, come across someone whose peddling SEO standards, don’t hiss, rather listen and learn. Then go out and find 3 more guys peddling the same wares. They’ll differ in their solutions just a sure a designers differ in their visions.
What I find interesting is how these left and right brained people differ so much in their solutions, but are so similar in the manner they value their own solutions.
Don’t limit yourself in your craft. You’ll learn more.