It’s not a purely hypothetical world, just a harder one to implement. The reason SEO compromises usability and best practice development is because you can still achieve quick SEO wins without having to improve the latter.

Plus, SEO is derived from a marketing background, not a design/development one. This means it can step on a lot of toes to get what it wants, and does often.

But, I do believe the days of tweaking just for Google will not last forever. Usability *is* also SEO, and this must be constantly pushed until people realise that we need to optimise for *many* traffic streams, so comprimising usability and best practice development is actually hurting your SEO campaign long term.

Also, using semantic markup in sites creates better search results. Creating a site (without google analytics, etc.) that works, with good content, good content vs. code ratio, that scores with a lot of search engines.

But you hit the nail on the head: serve useful and relevant results that the user is looking for.

Great topic!

If I come across a site like that when searching, I will more often than not go back to the results and chose a lower result.

When developing sites, I concentrate on standards and usability, whilst keeping in mind SEO when writing copy and headings.

A well structured site with correct use of h1 tags etc should get good search engine results without too much trouble.

Has anyone used the theory of simply improving the usability of a site and nothing else? Did it improve traffic and positions in the SERPSs?

I *sort of* agree that what the article describes is ‘White-Hat SEO’ but I do believe it is more than that. I view White-Hat SEO as SEO that isn’t ‘naughty.’ The article describes a more user-based SEO campaign. I guess this depends on your definition of White-Hat SEO though.

As for the stats you mentioned: Do you think Google use these stats in their algorithm? Do you know of any posts on the subject? I’d love to read up on this.

The other day I inspected my Mint stats and by clicking on the referrers I found out that, from my point of view, I have quite a bunch of Google.com top positions for some pretty average search terms (try “LP storage”). I then proceeded to do a one-day snapshot, collecting screenshots of every top-5 position I have on Google.com.

Lots.

So, what I’m trying to say is simply this: Don’t try too hard. In my case, it just happened. I type away, people sometimes link to it or just read it and disappear into thin air and my Google SE rankings crawl up.

Accessibility sucks on my site, satisfaction might be a different matter.

Not that I care though.
Maybe that last statement is really what it boils down to.

Link found here:
http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic.php?t=74245

Why don’t you care?

I’m an amateur who just keeps a website as a hobby. I have invested some time into trying to make it somewhat accessible by getting rid of my former bloated table layout and perhaps my next version will be better in that department, but I’m doing this for the fun of it and am not investing more time than necessary. Life is more important than trying to iron out the latest browser incompatibilities, getting top search engine positions or keeping up with the latest developments altogether. If you (are trying to) make money off your site though or are more serious about things than I am, by all means, one should get/do things right.

Volkher, I think that putting effort into the usability has worked out for you. It’s proof of the concept above, I guess. No real effort put into SEO but effort placed into usability can really boost the site in the SERPs.

As a matter of fact, I recall a Google Senior Engineering Manager (her name escapes me), at a Search Engines Strategies conference a couple of years ago, say that, for a given keyword, Google’s algorithm will rank higher sites designed with people in mind (meaning, sites that are text-rich, relevant to keyword being searched, with just about enough content -not too much, not too little-, etc.)

My two cents.