SEO Efforts Sabotage User Experience
Search engine optimization is a mixture of science, experience, and luck and it is a driving force that helps bring traffic to a web site. Along with pay per click advertising and link building strategies, optimizing content is a must if you want to gain traction against your competitors.
While there are both copywriters and search engine marketers out there that specialize in writing highly optimized content for search engines, they are forgetting about a very simple and basic fundamental practice, the user experience. I’ve noticed a gap lately between search engine optimization and the user experience that keeps getting wider. Are we sacrificing the user experience for optimized content that doesn’t mean anything to anyone except the search engines? The user should always be our main focus and there does exist a balance between SEO and the user experience. We just need to work harder to find that balance and achieve web site zen.
Your rankings in the search engines are not increasing. You start to panic. What do you do? Your marketing manager tells you to add some more pages. The copywriter and search engine marketer work together to write some highly optimized content that serves no purpose to the end user. They pass it over to the web development team and they publish it. Sound familiar?
The above imaginary content are not relevant to anything. In fact, it is usually thrown into the architecture so only confuse people that land on the page. Creating traction and developing a strong presence is a high priority but so is the user experience. Your visitors and there time are precious commodities. If your web site leaves a bad taste in their mouth, they’ll more than likely never come back. Remember. happy users = company growth.
I’d like to hear what other people have to say about this. Agree? Disagree? What have you experienced?
