SEO follows usability

Jakob Nielsen has written a post about SEO and Usability, in which he briefly describes the relationship between the two disciplines.

I agree with Nielsen, but I think the point can be taken further. If you build an online service with user experience as the top priority, you will usually get a solid SEO foundation as part of the work. This does not mean SEO should be ignored. Quite the opposite.

The order matters. If you focus on users from the beginning, you can always adjust and improve the SEO later. The reverse is much harder. Start with SEO as the foundation, then try to add usability on top, and you are likely to end up with a product that serves neither purpose especially well.

A user-focused service already requires many of the things SEO tends to ask for:

• Organise content so it is easy to understand and navigate.
• Produce relevant content that reflects what readers actually want to read or see.
• Design a human-readable URL structure that reflects how the content is organised and where users are within the site.
• Structure HTML mark-up properly, with a small footprint and relevant elements used for their intended purpose: page titles, window titles, emphasis, quotes, images, paragraphs and meta tags.
• Create scannable layouts with meaningful headings, useful subheadings and paragraphs of appropriate length.
• Use plain, concise, marketese-free language that is easy to read and understand. Avoid ‘clever’ wording and pun headlines.
• Help users find more information through relevant category links and useful outbound links.

A full list of good UX practices would be longer, obviously. The point is that many of these are also the things you will find in SEO books.

That is the useful overlap. Do the user-centred work properly, and a large part of SEO stops being a separate layer. It becomes the natural result of making the service understandable, usable and worth reading.