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Location, location, location. It's true as ever online. If you can't find my site, what's the point? And that's why I chose to spend my time promoting, rather than adding product history pages. Product history seekers rarely convert, by the way.
<Why does anyone bother to pretend they design soley for the user?>
Because GoogleGuy is watching :-).
Well dont expect to earn a living for long if you are indeed responsible for bottom line profits and not just spinning silly naive clients that free search engine hits ALONE for a limited perios are the way you should be assessed and paid. Clients are getting smarter from experience all the time.
If you are not targeting SE and google free listings for your promotion, it is quite conceivable that you design sites soley for the user. For one of our sites our promotion does not involve free listings at all. We advertise via adwords, OV, ads on other sites, print ads, and word of mouth at conferences. That one is solely designed for the user.
Others do target Google for free exposure. In those cases almost ALL the "SEO" we do is based on principles of good document design or publishing established way before Tim Berners-Lee thought of the WWW, let alone commercial entities and entrepreners thinking how to use it.
Basically the following are both established published principles AS WELL AS good SEO principles AS WELL AS points covered in the guidelines of such entities as Google and AV.
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1. A good descriptive title.
2. Good descriptive concise summaries.
3. Good transparant citations to original sources
4. A good document structure outlined clearly (H1's, page (chapter) structure etc)
5. The use of diagrams, and graphics when they are (honestly) "worth a thousand words" (or bytes)
6. Original, innovative and compelling content
7. Good indexes, glossaries, etc.
8. Keywords which attract attention from possible punters
9. Copy designed specifically for the reading level and "jargon" and understood language of your target market (users)
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point is there is no difference between deisgning for users and designing for search engines in the most critical areas. You are doing both at the same time, until you start trying to spin or lying about your offerings. - in which case in both the publishing world and the on-line world you will lose your reputation over time.
Key is to assess your Promotion, Product, Price and Place (distrubution) separately. Fudging your P-promotion with P-product is dangerous for a serious marketing strategy, and means you are less flexible in reacting to changes in the external marketing environment. Many times your strategies for each "P" can coincide, but they need to be assessed separately.
Your marketing strategy may be highly dependednt on google - a moving target. In that case I can understand why you asked the question if you are only looking at your own business model. Fact is, the amount of sites on the Web highly dependent on Google for their promotion i would suggest is surprisingly small. Its just that almost all of those site owners hang around WebmasterWorld!
I would consider helping the customer to buy easily as an important part of designing for the user. I spent part of yesterday with credit card in one hand and wedding invitation in other hand, trying to spend money on a gift. It was not easy. Those two department stores did not do their best to help me find the right product on their site and buy it, using my Web browser. (Incidentally, I was using IE5 with everything enabled at the time!)
The same problem exists with search engines. I see Google as an extension to the surfer's user agent, many searchers see it that way.
In the case of a product-selling site a person may begin with Google, Yahoo!, AOL, or wherever and type some words. They are using Google to connect with your product pages, just as they will use IE4, Nav4 or whatever to connect with your product pages once they've found them. It's a chain that needs to work from beginning to end, and for me it's all about helping the user.
For me, usability for people connecting via Google is as important as usability for people who've reached the site and are now connecting with it directly via their browser. Browsers feed on HTML and CSS, Google feeds on content and links.
My approach is simple:
1) Create informative, easy-to-read pages that tell readers what they want to know.
2) Use descriptive titles, headlines, and anchor text in links.
3) Use a logical navigation structure that highlights the content I want people to see.
4) Publish pages as HTML "flat files" with plain-English URLs.
Not only is this approach good for users; it's also good for Google--and it's good for me, because I can spend my time building a bigger and better site instead of scrambling to get my listings back every time Google fixes a weakness in its algorithm or spam filters.
"Slow but sure" is a good motto for building a Web business, IMHO. Stick to the basics, focus on long-term goals, and you won't be gnashing your teeth and worrying about your next month's income every time Google does an update.
In another thread someone posted that they were changing specific pages of their site to something else in response to a perceived google penalty. Someone else questioned the propriety of allowing google to enter into design considerations.
We here who are conscious of search engines, and I bet this holds true for europeforvisitors, structure our content for the users (best practice) but we always wrap that around the skeleton of a search engine friendly design. When you peel back the user friendliness and examine the code, the code is search engine friendly.
This is of course an abnormal practice. Anybody who's ever been to a graphic design or web design class can attest that search engines are never a consideration when it comes to document structure. Let's not forget this.
So, a better way to look at this problem is to realize that the best practice is to code for the search engines, but design for the user. With equal emphasis.
But Google tells me how to structure my site. I then pour my content into this fairly inflexable framework. Lucky for all of us Google's preffered site structure is good site design for the user.
The people who say they are doing well (like Europeforvisitors) simply by creating good content are probably just working with a site structure that Google happens to like, even if it wasn't a consideration. So many others here do what they consider 'for the user' and complain each and every month about their garbage rankings and how it's not fair because they have such good site design karma. They just didn't happen to hit it right.
But Google tells me how to structure my site.
Hehehe, Infoseek and AV taught me how to structure sites. ;)
No, seriously, there is a certain method of structuring that all search engines and users alike take kindly to. It basically comes down to simplisitc layouts, not only visibly, but behind the scenes too. I see many sites these days that try and cram so much onto one page that I think they've lost the perspective of the visitor. Even I, after surfing for 8 years, find these sites to be a little overwhelming and I know what to look for.
Clean, uncluttered pages with streamlined html and the use of css is surely the trend right now. After moving to validation and css a couple of years ago, it has gotten so much easier to do this stuff. Many of us who have been doing this for some time now, find that it comes naturally. We don't need to really concentrate on SEO per se, to achieve quality rankings across the board.
Yes, Google is the predominant player right now and probably will be for some time. Page structures that I used years ago work just as well in Google today as they did in Infoseek or AV back then. Oh, I've cleaned them up a little as you learn over time. But, the core concepts are still the same.
It is all about structure!
