In talking to people today, both at the Open Coffee morning and generally during the day, I kept coming back to Findability and SEO and the difference between the terms.

I try to think in terms of Findability rather than SEO as a general rule. Findability should be your goal, with SEO playing it’s part in any good Findability strategy.

You could argue it’s semantics, but SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and is therefore driven by the mechanics of the Search Engines.

Findability is about how easy it is for people to find your site.

A good Findability strategy may vary somewhat from site to site, but generally speaking SEO will have an integral role to play.

To get to the point: Keep Findability as your overall aim (rather than SEO) and your mind is focussed on the users.

If you’re in business, your Findability strategy should go hand in hand with a conversion strategy - it is essential when implementing any SEO work that you maintain a focus on the user in order to avoid ‘over-optimisation’.

Over-optimisation includes any SEO that impacts negatively on the user experience of your website.

Search Engine Watch have an article on over-optimisation which uses some extreme examples, here’s a good quote about the dangers involved:

At a minimum, your site will look clumsy and risk red flagging as spam by search engines; at worst, your conversion and usability will suffer, as your visitors become confused or frustrated and leave.

I’ll leave you with some invaluable advice from Google themselves:

Make pages for users, not for search engines. [...] Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”

This entry was posted on Friday, March 30th, 2007 at 4:47 pm and is filed under Findability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.