[UPHPU] SEO

[cole at colejoplin.com]

Quoting Orson Jones <orson.uphpu at bookstore.usu.edu>:

> Wade Preston Shearer wrote:
>>> It depends on from what perspective. They are related and both
>>> important in terms of the success of your website, yes, but SEO
>>> standard for "search engine optimization" and has nothing to do with
>>> usability. I website that is very well optimized might is likely to
>>> more usable than one that is not, but you can have a very, very
>>> optimized website that outperforms all of the others that is
>>> completely unusable.
>>
>> And for those that prefer English:
>>
>> It depends on from what perspective. They are related and both important
>> in terms of the success of your website, yes, but SEO stands for "search
>> engine optimization" and has nothing to do with usability. Only the
>> search engines care about SEO. A website that is very well optimized is
>> likely to be more usable than one that is not, but you can have a very,
>> very optimized website that outperforms all of the others that is
>> completely unusable.
>
> Take a couple examples from the CSS Zen Garden http://csszengarden.com/
>
> Both of these have the exact same html, and thus, the exact same SEO.
>
> White Lilly
> http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=036/036.css
>
> Wiggles the Wonderworm
> http://csszengarden.com/?cssfile=/099/099.css
>
> White Lilly is clean and easy to use.
> Wiggles the Wonderworm, while interesting, is harder to use.

I love SEO and CSS equally. The logical and clean structure of a  
CSS-layout markup not only can help SEO, but also lends itself for  
better accessibility. If you have good structure technically, good  
structure of page content is screaming out at you. At least you are  
more likely to actually THINK about it.

That being said, you can have usability as well. IMO, this is a case  
where you can have your cake and eat it too. The effort is in trying  
to get them all: good structure, content, SEO, usability,  
accessibility, maintainability, etc.. I believe this is more than  
possible, and should be the goal of every web site. They are  
definitely all separate, and equally important. The thing I've learned  
is that if you start off right with clean CSS-layout markup (like  
CSSZenGarden does), then everything else is a lot easier to implement  
right.

CSSZenGarden is a design exercise site. That's what the Wiggles design  
is. Honestly, I don't care if it's usable or not. I think it's  
absolutely brilliant, and very creative. I don't think he'd do a whole  
site this way. He was making a point. I loved it!

-- Cole