Ladies and Gentlemen!
Lets get ready to ruummmble!!
In the red corner, we have Search Engines!
And in the blue corner... Users!
Ding ding!
Fight!

Wait... why are Search Engines and Users battling it out? After all, search engines purpose is to help users find what they're looking for, fast. So why the competition? During a website plan, design, build and launch your online marketing team (or agency) will be faced with many challenging questions centered around what's best for the user and what's best for the search engines. There are best practices for each but what happens if what’s best for the search engine isn’t necessarily best for the user? And so the bout begins...

Round 1 - Site and Content Architecture

In this round, search engines and users are pretty evenly matched. Users want easy and intuitive navigation and the ability to quickly find what they're looking for by scanning the content of your site. Search engines want the same thing. They need to easily access your site and its pages and pull unique and relevant content to provide to users when they search.

Round 2 - User Interface Design

Now the fight really heats up. Punches exchanged over text vs. images, keyworded headlines and subheads, hyperlinks, optimization placement, fonts, buttons, breadcrumbs, and animation just to name a few... Search engines love text and keywords. Users love a combination of aesthetic imagery and condensed text to quickly scan. While both sides can get what they want, jab for jab, it’s the users who should come out on top in this round.

Round 3 - Development

Search engines power through this round with many back-end, behind the scene options to tailor your website for the use of search engines. Meta keywords, title tags, alt image tags and meta descriptions are your best bet to combat with the search engine compromises your team takes in the User Interface Design round.

Round 4 - Launch and Ongoing Management

The final round is another evenly matched one. Submission to search engines, keeping up-to-date website content, keyword trend monitoring, link building, blogging.. it’s all to meet the needs of both search engines and users.

So who prevails?

It’s a draw. However anti-climatic it may be, it’s true. It requires a balance throughout all rounds to create an effective website that is indexed by search engines, found by users and provides a great online user experience.

Does your website keep both search engines and users in mind?