In every project there is some kind of give-and-take that goes on. Every side makes sacrifices, every side wins or loses its little battles for the good of the project. Today I want to talk about two groups that are clashing a lot in my projects lately. Namely SEO (Search Engine Optimization, or “How to be Google’s friend who gets invited to all the cool parties”) and Usability (that’s how easy and intuitive information and layout are, or “How to win friends and influence people”). For the purposes of the discussion I might put a little accessibility in on the Usability side.
SEO is concerned with metrics, robots, and page rank. The SEO expert is constantly trying to see what makes the search engine algorithms tick with tips and tricks to get your page seen, get traffic moved to the site, and make sure it stays that way. SEO isn’t easy and requires a fanatical instinct to keep track of what does and doesn’t work (as no one is really privy to how the search engines truly work) with one finger on the pulse of the news and one eye on how “black-hat” they can be. In old western films, the bad guys wore black hats, the good guys: white. Many practices in SEO can be what’s known as “gray hat” which is not quite “white hat” (read:good and above board), but makes you go, “hmmmm… I dunno”. “Black hat” SEO can get you banned from Google’s listing (the abyss from which there is no return) but “gray hat” stuff can get you up in the rankings faster than strict “White hat” stuff at times. There are also to types of SEO: Organic and Inorganic.
Organic SEO is little things you can do, in building a project, to grow the SEO. Clean, W3C-compliant code; clean, well written copy full of good information and keywords that users are searching for; frequent blog updates; links to the site as a good resource; and frequent visitors to the site are all good examples of organic SEO. Inorganic SEO involves paying for advertisements in the search engines: Google Adwords, for example, are examples of inorganic SEO, whereby paying Google, you appear higher. Those who have huge budgets and good resources can become very high in the rankings very quickly this way.
Usability, as it relates to Web development, is the intuitive, human interaction with the system. How quickly can users perform tasks? How willing are they to perform a function? How do users react to information given? Given a question or task, how does the user find the answer or perform the task? All these things are involved in the development of a usable GUI (graphic user-interface) that the client will use. A huge component of this is the KISS principal (also known as Ockham’s Razor) in which the superfluous is stripped away and the simplest interface is best.
For the most part, these two things live in harmony in a project. In fact, many good SEO tricks are great for usability! Copy, for instance, when well written, is great for search engines to find keywords and presentation of choice information on whatever topic’s being written about. Obviously, well-written copy is a wonderful way for users to find, quickly and easily, instructions, information, or the answer to their problems. Linking through sites is also a great way to increase SEO, yet it’s just as good for usability, delivering a clear link to repositories of useful information right then and there.
When these disciplines clash, however, things get nasty. Not to take sides, but it’s often Usability that suffers when the titans meet. SEO is quickly backed up with hard numbers, site metrics, and analytical data sets. Usability relies on trust of the developer - how they know how to build sites the right way with the right information in the correct structure. A technique to increase SEO is to have URLs (in your address bar) that have lots of keywords. for instance, if you really care about being #1 for palm beach real estate, your “management team page” might be buried under search engine friendly named folders: “http://www.yoursiteurl.com/palm-beach-homes/palm-beach-real-estate/palm-beach-community/your-palm-beach-realator-home-team.html”. This is chock full of awesome terms in your link. But what if I am a user who’s at an internet cafe? I’m cruising for real estate with my friends, and I want to share this link. Barring using TinyURL, I’m stuck with this bulky URL that’s friendly to Google, but it’s no friend to me.
This is true when copy gets out of hand, as well. If Google and other search engines can only index what they can “see”, most of what is indexed is copy. It would make sense then, to increase the amount of copy on a site so there’s more for the search engines to index. Adding more copy, however, quickly overwhelms the site visitor. We live in the age of the instant gratifications - knowledge is quickly at our fingertips and we can, and do expect to be given what information we need quickly. If users have to sift through huge amounts of copy on every page, or perhaps worse, deal with multiple pages with only a little copy and have to click through three or four pages to find information that could have been regulated to one page, then the site fails its human visitors.
It’s important to have a good balance between SEO and Usability. You want Google et al. to find you, but you also want to keep your site visitors coming back for more. Google might bring you traffic and you want Google to like you, but a good site will get humans coming back for more and bringing their friends to see your site. As big and powerful as she is, Google doesn’t have any friends she’ll bring to you.
