Building Your Site for Users is Not Enough.

I am not going to make many friends with this post, but I think it is about time someone said it. If your SEO firm (search engine optimization firm) is telling you to build websites “for the user” and not “for the bots”, fire them. Yes, that’s right. Politely tell them to stuff it, and move along to better things. There is nothing wrong with building websites for the user, but there is something wrong with doing it in lew of building websites for the bots – especially when the two are in no way mutually exclusive. Let’s take a look at a real world example of how a website “built for the user” fails because it wasn’t also “built for the bots”. We will look at OpenOffice.org, the popular...