Should you design your website for search engines or users?

Nov 28, 2006

This is an eternal dilemma in web designing and Internet marketing circles. A prevalent view point these days is that create user-friendly websites and on their own they become search engine friendly websites. Well, it’s not always true. The best websites don’t get ranked well by the search engines sometimes. So how do you make a decision: how do you decide what should be your preference — search engines or your readers/visitors/users?

Cr8pc has an interesting post titled Website Design, SEO and Usability Laws or Beat Your Own Drum? where Kim concludes with:

Always keep in mind your priorities and goals for your website and hold them firm as your protective totem. Techniques and practices that help you achieve those goals are the choices you want to make.

Actually she wrote the post referring to Aaron Wall’s Bad Advice That Sounds Good where Aaron says that website design and usability consultants needlessly make things complicated by setting unrealistic standards for designing and creating websites.

Personally, I feel creating “standards based” website is not a bad idea if you can do that but this shouldn’t be an obsession because many websites that don’t validate do quite well on the Internet. Regarding for whom one should create a website, I think both search engines and readers are important for the success of your website. If you create great content and if not many people know about that content, then there is no use creating it day after day. Similarly if search engines love your website but your readers run away after the first glimpse it isn’t doing much good too.

There has to be a middle path and that path is not impossible.