[Sigia-l] SEO versus Experience design versus usability

[Brett Taylor]

What I find interesting with this topic is..."When did SEO" even go
away. If any of you have been around the industry for more than 2 years
this has been an ongoing issue from the start. I was a contract
developer and my clients, though low end of the pole compared to what I
am doing now were worried about SEO and I as I assume most of you
struggled. What I found the struggles to be is, the search engines
randomly changed the way they spidered/indexed pages. Once month they
were doing this, the next something different so as developers we were
constantly chasing the ball and then eventually, I would tell my clients
that there were better knowledgeable companies that focused on SEO.

So now we are back to it and as in IA few are trying to drive how to
best do it vs, what Marianne explained here. I agree with her.

What is happening here, like in IA, its come back around the pole and
now people are jumping on the band wagon to make this a new practice
because IAs are a dime a dozen and that practice doesn't solicit the
financial returns that IA use too.

Instead of one trying to drive the wagon, maybe we should be about
sharing knowledge and all taking away with what they want vs. some
thinking one way is the only way.

-----Original Message-----
From: sigia-l-bounces at asis.org [mailto:sigia-l-bounces at asis.org] On
Behalf Of Marianne
Sent: Wednesday, October 11, 2006 8:41 AM
To: 'Marianne'; sigia-l at asis.org
Subject: [Sigia-l] SEO versus Experience design versus usability


Good Morning All,

I'm going to follow protocol and trim the posts.

For Ziya [with knees knocking]:

Actually, good search optimization [SEO] is far from "immediate return"
in any respect that I know. Yes, you can pay a lot of money and skirt
the gray side of SEO to produce artificial elevation in ranking. And the
updates that Skot references, those that see high ranking sites tumbling
into the search results basement, eventually see this artifice as
shallow and re-rank according to additional factors created to maintain
the "wisdom of crowds"
that brought Google to the top of Web searches. I am forthright with my
clients about long-term benefits from good organic SEO and possible
short-term benefits from paid search for desired position in the
interim. 

The NYT article is interesting to me in that it seems to lack an
understanding of the fundamentals of search technology. Page titles need
not be boring. They just need to do their job and describe the content
found in the article. Hyperbole is not banned by search engines. It just
needs to be a reflection of something found on the page. I do not see
this as a bad thing. 

For Skot:

I apologize of I conveyed the idea that information architecture was all
about site structure. I've signed the non-proliferation accord on
restarting the "what is IA" discussion. I intended to convey that the
latest developments in search technology play to this part of IA. I do
respectfully disagree with you that solely focusing on quality content
and solid site structure are satisfactory for discoverability by search
technology. Neilsen makes two of many fundamental points. I'm hoping to
present the others in Las Vegas in March. Optimizing a site is not
intuitive. It is a discipline that is mastered by few and labored over
my many such as myself on a daily basis of education and discourse.
While not a silver bullet, SEO is a sound investment and an ongoing one
as search technology is far from standing still.  

Marianne Sweeny
Daedalus Information Systems
"Find it faster."


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