Don’t SEO your site, UEO them
I was reading the Shoemoney blog today when I saw his post of Sage Lewis’ video debating if SEO is dead. It is funny to me that many people I have seen that seem to be on opposite sides of this argument are really saying the same thing and completely agree with each other but are confused on terminology.
I agree, SEO is dying. It isn’t quite dead yet, but is heading toward extinction as Google continues to grow and incorporate more human generated information into it’s algorithm. However, SEOs will continue to thrive as they move away from tricking the algorithms and more toward practicing UEO (User Experience Optimization) which good SEOs are already doing.
Typically, the phrase SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is used to describe tweaking your website to take advantage of known deficiencies in search engine algorithms in order to increase your rankings for particular key terms. SEO, if done properly, works. However, many of the known search engine algorithm deficiencies are constantly being improved and modified so that many SEO tweaks only have a short term effect. I understand that the term SEO has grown to often encompass more than this, but if you poll around, you’ll see that this is most people’s understanding of the term.
It is the mission of search engine companies to provide users with the best search experience possible by feeding them the information they desire. The search engines attempt to cater completely to the user and their needs. With SEO, we have created a struggle between the search engines and website owners in which we fight to “fool” the engines in falsely ranking our sites.
What we should be focusing on is UEO (User Experience Optimization) and making sure we optimize our website to provide our users with the information they desire in a format that is easy for them to browse. With UEO, website owners work more in harmony with search engines as we both share the same goal of quality content that is easily accessible.
When performing UEO on your website, don’t worry about the search engine rankings. If you build quality sites that are user friendly, search engine love will follow. Considering UEO when developing your sites will lead to much longer, more sustainable search engine ranking results.
Tags: seo, SEO is Dead, Shoemoney, UEO, User Experience Optimization
June 11th, 2008 at 1:17 pm
[...] [1] http://www.jamersan.com/2008/06/dont-seo-your-site-ueo-them/ [...]
June 11th, 2008 at 3:14 pm
you must do PPC for a living…
SEO isn’t dead when 2 of the fortune 100 aren’t (weren’t.. now they have stats after our meeting), even using analytics on the organic traffic… it’s still an infant..
p.s. SEO is pretty close the the same as it was in 1995… a searchbot (at the time webcrawler’s bot “spider” now “googlebot”) reads HTML (now it’s dhtml, xml, asp, etc..) looks for unique, relevant content and returns to store that information (the properties of the object, keywords vs. URL authority vs. update frequency), in a database, centered around a URL.. it’s a program (the search engine) and a website is an object… object oriented thinking isn’t going away anytime soon…
=)
June 11th, 2008 at 3:50 pm
Paisley,
I appreciate the comments, but I feel you are, like the article states is common, hung up on semantics.
SEO has come to be understood as gaming the search engines for better rankings.
All I am saying is that as search engines use more human generated content (toolbars, feedback, etc) in their algorithm, that the opportunity for gaming will slow down and the main focus of SEO will not be Search Engine Optimization, but User Experience Optimization (UEO) which is what the search engines want us to be focused on.
Yes, I will admit that people will still focus on UEO simply because it helps with search engine rankings which technically makes it SEO, but not in the sense defined above (taking advantage of deficiencies in search algorithms). Thus, SEO as defined above will slowly die (or be a playing field only for the truly creative).
June 13th, 2008 at 6:01 am
UEO will definitely help in search engine rankings. E.g. A good user experience demands that all the pages in your site be well linked together for easy accessibility. And the search engine spiders also want the same thing.
That said, people will never stop gaming the search engines. As the engines evolve, so will the methods to game them.
June 13th, 2008 at 7:27 am
Mayank,
I agree that the methods to game them will evolve. My argument is that the methods to game them will become so complex that most people will opt to build sites legitimately instead of using black hat techniques that are either beyond their level or beyond how hard they want to work. Thus, leaving blackhat seo for the truly gifted and relegating everyone else to legitimate UEO.