SEO Should Follow Contingency Design

I recently finished reading Defensive Design for the Web, by 37signals. The guys at 37 signals are great user interface designers and application builders. While reading the book I thought of a few connections between the worlds of contingency design and SEO, and how contingency design can help every SEO be both user oriented and search engine friendly.

Contingency design is always user oriented, and SEO tends to be very bot oriented, so the two might seem disconnected. Look a little closer though and you’ll see where they meet. Search engine robots are designed to provide searchers with the most relevant and useful results possible. Contingency design is also similarly user oriented, making it easier for users to decipher websites and helping them take the right path when they veer off course. Writing a website shouldn’t be uniquely focused on attracting search bots. Using tactics like incessant bolding of words and keyword stuffing within site content won’t do much for a user looking to get actual information out of your website. Getting the user to your site is important, but what you deliver for the user once he or she arrives is so much more important.

The bottom line is that no matter how much search traffic you attract, not delivering with well crafted, pertinent content will just lose your site credibility with users. Write a site for people, and search engine optimization will happen naturally.