According to Josh Hoopes, an SEO expert and the founder of CrazyNet Marketing, a perfect balance should be sought when it comes to Search Engine Optimization initiatives, just like the other facets of life which also strives to attain balance.
Despite the continuous rise of various social networking sites nowadays, most businesses still find it more effective for them to get their traffic from the search engines when they try to market their products and services. But beware of developing a tunnel syndrome which will make you focus solely on the SEO strategies instead of looking out after the needs of your readers, who should always be your first priority first and foremost, otherwise you will be harming your business over the long run instead of improving it.
Josh Hoopes notes that the goal for many websites has always been how to get that perfect balance between usability and SEO.
SEO initiatives comprise of things which are either visible or invisible to your users.
Invisible SEO activities consist of things such as optimization of the site's page speed, or title tag and meta-description modifications, among others. Although they may show initially on the search results, they practically don't enter the user's consciousness on a very obvious level.
You must be conscious not to fall into the trap of focusing singlemindedly on the SEO strategies to the point where you may already be taking for granted the usability of your site, which is actually more essential as far as your users are concerned.
Navigation is one aspect where this struggle between Search Engine Optimization and usability can be seen. While it may be very enticing to layout your site to achieve faster navigation and classify products in order to gain maximum SEO results, but if you would be doing these in a way that may contradict the natural and logical flow in which a user would have navigated the site, then you will only be turning off your users and irritating them perhaps in the long run.
Website publishers sometimes try to please the search engine robots too much as they try to anticipate how they could possibly make it easier for these crawlers to find all the pages on their site. This scenario illustrates the problem perfectly, as the emphasis is now placed on the robots' needs above those of the site's actual users; the right mindset should have been to prioritize usability and accessibility first, above all others, as these are the things that will be appreciated by your customers, who will ultimately be purchasing your products and services after all. The entire website's layout, content, features, product placements, and navigation must make sense to the actual customers first and foremost. Once you have the users' needs taken cared of can you now turn your attention towards the SEO activities.
The important thing is to find the perfect marriage between usability and SEO for your site.
One area where this may be executed is when selecting the relevant keywords that you would like to focus on for your site. In closing, Internet Marketing and SEO expert Josh Hoopes stresses that you must try to look for keywords which will be popular with your target audience and will also be relevant for your site at the same time; rather than blindly chasing a keywrod which may happen to be popular and yet does not have any connection to what your site as all about however.
