Abraham Lincoln’s famous description of the American Civil War states that a house divided against itself cannot stand. He was saying that infighting, that a war between brothers, would not eventually lead to the complete dissolution of the United States of America, but rather, to its complete absorption by one force or another. SEO and web design can be looked at through much the same lens. There are websites that have beautiful designs that nobody will ever see. They sacrifice beauty for the sake of beauty. There are sites with fantastic web presence and link ranking that nobody looks at because they have sacrificed everything to be ranked by search engines.
Where We Are, Whither We Are Tending
The major search engines are at a tipping point with content and SEO strategy. As it stands, the Internet grows every second. There’s a constant battle, both within the search companies, and outside, to avoid being overrun by emerging content. The search giants have responded by getting more personal with their search results. Google Plus Your World is trying to merge social networking with search. More than that, though, search is starting to rely on real user metrics as a larger and larger part of the ranking algorithm. One such metric is time spent on site, described as user engagement.
SEO cannot succeed on its own. SEO should not be the driving force of a business web presence. There must be a merger of SEO utilization and prudent web design
A Tendency to the Latter Condition
Universities and art schools have been training web designers for more than a decade. The internet has seen several phases of web design go into and out of fashion. Those sites still using outdated designs are outpaced by newer, cleaner, better designs when it comes to search ranking. Their users find less clutter, even if the content is very much the same. SEO cannot replace good design. Likewise, good design cannot replace SEO. At the moment, many people are still riding the web design bandwagon. They assume building the perfect website will drive the users in. Put simply, it won’t.
The reason SEO cannot replace good design is simple. SEO will drive users to your page – that is all. Once they arrive, the job of SEO has been done. From there, it’s up to the website to stand for itself, engage the user, and turn traffic into profit. The false assumption is that this will happen automatically. The time where having a flashy new page was enough to make a splash in the internet community has been over for many years.
If We Stand Firm, We Shall Not Fail
SEO is not something that happens overnight. Page rankings take time to become established after a campaign to improve them. It makes sense that, during this time, a website can undergo a serious renovation. The two things together make for an excellent business strategy.
