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Oh man, SEO…

Not only has this acronym crept onto every résumé for any person touching a computer. It has now turned into the biggest finger-pointing, sword-spearing acronym I’ve ever heard. [If you can think of a better acronym, I'm all ears. "I was just impaled by SEO." ;)]

I’m familiar with SEO, but to be honest, it’s all a black box. The best clues any of us non-google team members get are dropped by Matt Cutts - which should be required reading for anyone claiming to be an SEO expert. If you are in an interview, and the candidate says SEO and doesn’t read Matt, might as well end the interview right then and there.

But, how to not hire SEO fakers is not the point of this post. How SEO has evolved is the topic I am trying to pursue. Jaimie Sirovich has written a short history of SEO here. It’s helpful, but doesn’t cover the latest and greatest changes, which surround URL parameters, hyphens vs underscores and the number of directories deep among other things. For these latest changes, you should be reading Matt Cutts blog, as well as this post about SEO from Jon Henshaw and this full transcript (live blogged?) by Dr. David. Matt corrects of few of Jon’s statements in his blog entry about SEO white hat techniques, but it’s still a good overview.

The biggest lesson I am learning about the subject at hand, is this: SEO, visual aesthetics and user experience are diametrically opposed to one another. This idea in itself is extremely puzzling and painful.

I think an example might help to better illustrate the point. Let’s say you have a website about farming. Worm farming, specifically. So you have a bunch of pages with different worm species, blood worms, flat worms, earth worms etc.

On your worm site, you have a cool little experience on worm racing. You create a bunch more pages, and you want to link each of these new worm race pages together inside the worm racing experience. So you have the bloodworm race page, and the night crawler race page for all the different worms you farm. When you’re inside the worm race experience, you want to link the worm species race pages together in your navigation.

So the term ‘bloodworm’ goes to the bloodworm race page, and the term ‘night crawler’ does the same - linking to the ‘night crawler’ race page. However, you already have a page for bloodworms, the bloodworm main information page, which you already link to using the term ‘bloodworm’. Now, you have linked the same term, but it goes to two different URLs. One goes to that worm’s main page, and one goes to that worm’s race page. So in the worm race experience, you are tempted to add the word race after each worm species. Like this: ‘Bloodworm Race’, ‘Night crawler Race’, ‘Flatworm Race’.

This is the point that SEO starts to fight with user experience and aesthetics. You don’t want the word race after each species, it not only looks bad, it’s hard to read. However, it’s better for SEO. Your developers may be tempted to throw a span tag in there with a CSS display:none around the word race. Problem solved, right? Wrong. Google considers this a black hat technique. Read more about hidden link text here. So what is the worm farmer to do?

Now, what I find so crazy about this, Google is totally cool with you building a bunch of HTML pages to expose flash content to a crawler. I personally don’t see a real difference. If it’s ‘O.K.’ to build a user experience in Flash and then another in HTML solely for Google bot, how is not cool to hide repetitive words in a link. Especially a link that is under a h2 tag, or even an h5-tag header of that term? In our case, the header is Races.

But the issue doesn’t really end there. Now comes catchy headlines. It’s the general rule of journalist and writers alike to write a catchy headline. It’s just human nature to click on the weird and unknown. People are much more likely to click a link that reads: ‘Amazing Nude Man gets His’ then they are ‘Joe Shmoe Book Published’. Certainly, the term nude helps, but you get the idea. Curiosity killed the cat. But from an SEO perspective, writers are forced to pick the most boring and spelled-out titles. To me, this sucks!

Certainly, I want to be found in Google, and if you Google my name, it’s the first spot. But I also want to be able to have a worm farming website that wins in Google… Why Google - why do you punish us? Why do SEO, aesthetics and user experience have to all be opposed to one another? I await your response