SUO: Search and User Optimization

Being biased towards usability, I have to admit that I've always been a little skeptical about the world of search engine optimization (SEO). Of course, a lot of this skepticism goes back to having worked in the internet industry since the mid-90's. In the pre-Google days, SEO was little more than an arms race, a contest to see who could trick the search engines most effectively for the top spot. Claims of getting people to the top of search results for $19.95 were common, and many of these tricks, like keyword-loading a page, often led to lousy content and all but unusable sites.

Times have changed, though, and I've been rediscovering the world of search engine optimization and marketing over the past six months. It started when I attended the Search Engine Strategies Conference in Chicago last winter. In addition to being one of the most educational events I've been to in quite a while, SES really helped me to see that the search engines have matured. Search spiders are being built to mimic human link-following, and crude measures of importance, like how many times a keyword appears on a page, are being replaced by complex algorithms that attempt to measure popularity, usefulness and authority.

I've also been surprised to discover how helpful the SEO community has become, with more and more people taking a holistic approach to web design and willing to share information with other professionals. Armed with some of my newfound search knowledge, I set to work using it on a major client redesign, and quickly discovered something that will change the way I approach website development: search engine optimization best practices have come to share a lot in common with usability best practices.

At the end of the day, both search engines and users want sites that are well-organized, rich in content, and easy to navigate. These days, both processes also tend to be evolutionary. The old worlds of SEO and usability often meant arriving at the end of the development process and making a laundry list of flaws. By it's very definition, though, "optimization" refers to a process of taking something that may or may not already be good and constantly working to make it better.

So, in that spirit, I propose a new term: SUO, Search & User Optimization. Designing sites for search engines and users is a process that needs to happen early and often, constantly optimizing websites to reach the right people and deliver what they want. In many ways, too, search is the begining of any site's user experience, and understanding how your site is represented on search engines and reaches search users is an integral part of good usability.