John Gibbard has two interesting posts that explores whether search engine optimisation (SEO) results in increased usability. In the first post he asks “Does SEO improve usability?” and in the second post he responds to a number of comments regarding his original ideas. This is a great question to ask, but having a little bit of SEO experience myself, my opinion would be that any overt attempt to improve search engine optimization that in any way compromises the on-page content in the eyes of readers not search engine crawlers is doomed to failure sooner or later.
The Google algorithm is getting better and better over time and it stands to reason that any method one uses to circumvent or create shortcuts to doing well in the search engine results pages is going to be negated by some future algorithm update. Content is king, it becomes even more true each year, and although on-page SEO is certainly worth paying attention to you’ll ultimately be best off if you simply focus on informative writing of excellent quality.
