It’s a question which pops up sometimes, should I focus on content which is friendly to search engines or which would be really useful to my visitors? They don’t always match.
There are some practices which might be perfectly acceptable for a search engine but completely unusable by my visitors. Style is a prime example to put it into context. Google won’t really care how big my fonts are and in what colours (broadly speaking - most search engines care that I’m not trying to screw with the numbers by hiding content) my content is but my visually awae users will.
The other way around, I may use tables, images with text in them and my users may get an enhanced experience but the search engines will be unable to read and list some of that content, meaning that my search engine positioning could suffer for it.
Flash content was a real problem for a long time. Don’t get me wrong, Flash really isn’t “my thing”, I dislike using flashy, moving, whizzy stuff for a website design, which in my opinion is a book, not a cheap poster. That said, a lot of users like flash so I certainly don’t discount it as a medium - in its place. Now Flash content can be output via an SDK into html content with links and text readable by search engines which really plugs a gap. Great, a sort of happy middle-ground for all.
What about images? why can we not find a way of embedding the text used into the image itself?
This would be especcially useful for logos which incorporate the company name. Of course we can add alt text etc but I’m talking about something which is auto embedded at the creation stage, thereby more trustworthy. Image size would of course increase but I can see real benefits. MP3’s and Movie files have embedded tags which can be read, why not other file types, some image formats already store when and how the image was taken, SGML?
There are so many things that I wish I knew more about, to be able to influence them and develop them from creation to release. I do it with websites and applications but what about defining the code in the first place? I simply follow the rules laid out by others to ensure that browsers and applications can process what I have written, to be someone who wrote the processes followed by others is a truly mammoth task.
I’ve digressed, which is nothing new.
There is almost always a play off between 100% SEO and 100% usability, bring into it that the site must look good and function well and you end up with a whole melting pot. The long and the short of it is that you need to decide what’s most important to you. For me it’s that the user has a good experience, search engines always come second.
