SEO Defended

I read an article just now in a webmaster newsletter I subscribe to. The author was introducing, at least to me, a web design concept he called "Sensory and Experience Design" or SenEx. Basically he's saying that incorporating audio and video will improve visitor engagement, thus website performance. Now I don't dispute the concept, in fact I wrote an article earlier this year about the use of Flash to improve website ROI. The problem I have is with his insistence that those of us who believe in Search Engine Optimization are responsible for unfriendly, unengaging and poor performing websites.

While the SEO universe has it's share of black hat charlatans and just plain lazy, incompetent practitioners, I believe that the beauty of what we do (done correctly) is that it improves both the visitor's experience with the website and with the search engine. The author of the SenEx article lists 7 questions that website owners should ask themselves about the impact of SEO on their websites.

1. Do the search engine tactics employed on your site degrade, obscure, or in some way diminish the ability of your website visitors to quickly find the information they want?

2. Do these search engine tactics impede your ability to effectively deliver your marketing message in a way that attracts attention, triggers relevant sensory experience, and embeds your message in your visitors' memories?

3. Do tactics like outbound reciprocal links and inline body-text links send people away from your site when you want them to stick around and hear what you have to say?

4. Do you have excessive repetitive copy-text on your site aimed at being indexed by search engines rather than read by people for clear concise understanding?

5. Have you reduced your complex message or instructions to a series of bulleted points that confuse rather than clarify?

6. Do your search engine tactics concentrate on the volume of traffic rather than the quality?

7. Is the traffic you're attracting leaving your site as fast as it's arriving?

As someone who has been developing and optimizing websites for 10 years, I guess I've developed a totally different perspective.

1. Search engines and web developers seek the same results (ideally). Search engines are on an unending quest to improve relevancy and a good web developer/optimizer's sole purpose is to express his client's offerings to the most relevant audience.

2. The way a search engine "scores" a website is, in general terms, the way human beings view a website: headlines, bullet points, text and images. First we scan for relevance, then we read, look at images, watch video, etc. I have always taught my clients that SEO makes the site both more user friendly and search engine friendly.

3. Web performance is, or should be, measured in terms of ROI. Long gone are the days when we cared about overall site traffic, other than trend issues. In 1996 people were mesmerized by "hits." Now the word never comes up. My clients want to know how many sales or how many leads they got last month.

4. Website content was and is king. Fads, like reciprocal links, come and go but responsible developers continue to stress unique and timely content. This is so in part because search engines will always try to find ways to evaluate and rank that content. Remember, visitors want relevant content and search engines want visitor loyalty.

5. New forms of content have become relevant to the medium thanks to broadband adoption rates. While I'm still a little dubious about stand alone audio for most commercial websites, there is no doubt video has come of age. It's a great way to personalize the site the way a good salesman personalizes the pitch.

6. Finally, a significant responsibility of a good web developer or SEO professional is to help the client to distill his complex message into a series of bullet-like points. On the web people are in a hurry. They'll scan that first page to determine its relevancy to their quest. If you can't get your message across simply and quickly they're gone. Who am I and why should you care? That's what marketing is all about.

In my mind, SEO, knowledgeably practiced, is a key to web success and those who ignore the practical realities and limitations of the web's infrastructure are doomed to have pretty websites but few customers.