Comments on: SEO and UX

By: Dave

Dave — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 18:05:37 +0000

At this point, I have an automatic distrust of widely shared content because it’s far to easy to game the social media results.

I suspect at some point, search engines incorporate gaming signals into the algorithms, just as reciprocal linking has been incorporated. That won’t bode well for people relying on automated social media promotion and quid pro quo relationships with like minded marketers. Which is fine by me.

My disgust with this has reached a point where I have removed all social media linking from my websites.

By: How To Implement Rel=Author

How To Implement Rel=Author — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 17:41:17 +0000

[...] post, and my recent Google+ review both have rel=”author” display but an older post on SEO and UX does not. To be clear, it’s not about the age of the URL, it’s simply what Google is [...]

By: Quora

Quora — Thu, 26 May 2011 21:54:33 +0000

Is SEO destroying search relevancy?…

A thousand times NO. SEO is about ensuring that people looking for specific content … find it! It’s not about manipulation, it’s about visibility. SEO is about matching query intent with relevancy. How would that destroy search? Not SEO There are a…

By: Micah

Micah — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 21:08:46 +0000

I’ve never thought of SEO as an evil – it often highlights how people think about a company’s products or services. For instance, companies often want to group things by internal product lines that are never used in searches. SEO helps highlight this and encourages the site to be organized according to the user’s language. SEO often makes this kind of change an easier sell than just UX reasoning alone.

Where I sometimes bump into issues between UX and SEO is when long tail terms or synonyms are targeted. For example, if an artificial turf company wants to rank well for “artificial turf”, “synthetic turf”, and “astro turf” terms, those phrases need to have content on the site, but those terms all describe the same stuff. From a UX (and branding) perspective I’d rather be consistent with the phrasing. These kinds of SEO needs can make it difficult to avoid content that feels out of place or duplicated. Targeting long tail terms can sometimes lead to content that never would have been considered from just a user perspective.

Those SEO goals for long tail terms and synonyms are still important and worthy, but it may require a little compromise in the end. Like you said, if we keep our eye on conversions we are likely to find the right balance.