Webforumz Newsletter - October 2007
Articles
SEO, usability and readability: the inseparable cousins.
SEO is like a very long tightrope: as you start walking along, there is little to throw you off balance; but as you get further along the line you start to sway a little. It's all a matter of keeping your eye on the horizon and keeping the balance just perfect!
There are many sites out there that really do sacrifice customers for the sake of their SEO. They keyword-stuff pages wherever they possibly can and maybe they'll get high rankings, maybe they won't, but their customers are put off because pages sound robotic to read (readability suffers) and the pages are pretty obviously engineered for search engines' needs and not customers'.
You also have pages where the order of content is pretty idiotic, again for search engines' reasons. The usability suffers and so do the company's profits as customers go somewhere else that 'just makes sense' to them.
As an SEO Specialist, I've seen some really crazy things done by people who think they know all about SEO (for the SEO pros reading this, you know the ones...). An awful lot of web designers and developers claim to know all about SEO and it often doesn't go down very well when I shoot down a webmaster over things when I get the chance: most just laugh at me; that is, until I point out how stupid the things they have done are. Their laughs generally turn to embarrassment when they realize they know a damn sight less than they thought.
What is the point of this article? Simple: don't lose sight of your customers and your visitors. SEO is a very fine line that can be walked and mastered very well with lots and lots of practice. However, getting SEO, readability AND usability spot on is harder, but gives the best to both robots and REAL PEOPLE!
Don't be tempted to inject keyword phrases willy-nilly just because there's room (careful with those extra <h>eadings), or because you think they'll go unnoticed. A lot of the time you can get away with it; sometimes where you put them 'just makes sense' and that's fine and good.
However well you think you know SEO, it is always wise to have a few people look at your work, not from an SEO perspective, but as a customer or a visitor.
Let me tell you, that bold text above is probably the best bit of SEO advice you'll hear in ages, because after all, SEO is to increase rankings...to increase traffic...to increase profit...to increase your bottom line!
That's it. It's all about the money (or site popularity in some of your cases), so put those customers/visitors first; you'll be glad you did.