Everyone seemed to have their place in the project life-cycle at the web design agency; everyone but little Findability. Occasionally someone would notice his value to a project, but instead of giving him the care he deserved, they’d just fork over copious amounts of cash to ship him off to his sketchy uncle SEO, who tied him up and fed him keywords all day long. He spent so much time at uncle SEO’s that everyone started to think Findability was SEO, and subsequently became a little dubious of his importance.
Aaron’s article, Findability, Orphan of the Web Design Industry is a great reminder that we should not overlook the importance of findability, nor confuse it with SEO and usability as we create our designs and interfaces.
On page SEO is overrated anyway. It’s important, don’t get me wrong, but SEO friendly text should be beneficial to search engines AND the people who read it.
I always figured the day I wrote for a search engine was the day I stopped writing. I see copywriters who don’t know how to do anything else. What an utterly miserable existence. Good copy for search engine optimization should include keywords because 1.) keywords helps PEOPLE understand what’s on your site and 2.) good copy gets backlinks, just like Aaron Walter’s article got a link back from you.
Keyword density tools for copywriters crack me up. Like anyone actually knows the magic formula for keyword density anyway. There are as many of those as there are SEO experts.
Anyway, have a good day.
Well put Michelle. One of the things I’ve always liked about Google was their goal of making the Web human-friendly, which they have backed up consistently by modifying their algorithms to reduce or eliminate the value of packing in keywords where they don’t belong.