The Big Web Design Question: SEO Or User Experience?

Asking whether web design or user experience is more important than search engine marketing is bit like asking if you'd prefer to have the first key you find - or the one that opens the door. The answer is not simple because the two goals of SEO and optimized design for the user are equally important, but accomplish different goals. Unfortunately, the different goals of web design and user experience often come in direct conflict with one another. An example of one SEO trick is to repeat certain keywords on your home page, as the frequency of occurrence of keywords can give you a higher ranking such as cooks.com (and this is actually improved!) But too much repetition and redundancy of keywords on your home page may not be good for the UX once visitors arrive. At last count, Cooks.com came up 9th on my search (with an average visit of less than 1 minute.) Compare that with Allrecipes.com (which came up number 1) or Epicurious.com (coming up 8). But keep in mind, good CMS solutions like Umbraco (for publishing) or Magento for e-commerce will have strong tools for behind the scenes meta tagging that will help keep messy stuff in the background while maintaining an attractive web design.

But honestly trying to reach the Google Nirvana with your web design is a bit like looking for the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. Google's March algorithm changes have many people scratching their heads. The main sites hurt seem to be the content farms like Mahalo, Ezinearaticles.com and Yahoo's Associated Content (which critics say amass content for the sole purpose of luring in search-engine traffic.) Google-generated traffic to each dropped more than 75%, according to software firm Sistrix. But anyone can get hit: Max Spankie, who operates the customer review website My3cents.com, said his site lost a significant portion of its traffic and revenues overnight following Google's algorithm change. That came as quite a surprise to Spankie, since My3cents.com was recently recognized as the top consumer complaint site by the non-profit Consumer Federation of America. Unlike some of the sites that now top My3cents.com in Google's rankings, all complaints on Spankie's site are moderated. Hundreds of companies use the site in their web design to interact with customers.

The bottom line there is there is no correct answer and your web design needs to balance the two goals and find rational ways to compromise and make tradeoffs between the two. I am not sure there is any methodical, structured system for making these tradeoffs but collaboration and cooperation between SEO and UX experts is key, and keeping one's eye on the overall business goals is too. In order to help you make some decisions, you can define User Experience as a marketing strategy and SEO as a tool to achieve the strategy (e.g. sell low price over quality). One final thought: both are essential. Balancing user experience with business needs is what good interaction web design should do. SEO done right can help drive traffic to your site, and good user experience will keep that traffic engaged and can lead to more conversions (if you're selling or promoting something). Most importantly, stay true to your brand. Generate good web design content with frequent updates, strong content hierarchy and organization. Pair that with solid meta tagging to achieve both SEO as well as well as user experience. This should form the backbone of your site.

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