It happened again this weekend. The "Search-Engine-Centrics" made a post about how search engine specific tasks are more important to SEO than user specific tasks. The "User-Centrics" then made a counter post. It happens all the time, and really - the debate isn't so huge and the two sides aren't really that far apart in their beliefs. The battle came about primarily because of the inflamatory vocabulary used (e.g. "Terrible SEO Advice"). It makes people go on the defensive about their own priorities.
If you get down into the meat of both of these articles though - they are both saying the essentially same thing. They are just looking at it from different points of view. The question, now, becomes: Which point of view is the right one? Optimize for Search Engines? Or Optimize for Users?
I would like to suggest that both are wrong and both are right. The most useful answer is: Optimize for Yourself!
Water, Water, Everywhere!
What's more important to the creation of water? Hydrogen? Or oxygen? One might argue that hydrogen is more important because you need twice as much of it. Others might argue that oxygen is more important because all the hydrogen in the world won't help you make water if you don't have any oxygen.
When it comes right down to it, neither answer is wholly correct. You do need both, period. If you are going to be creating your own water, though - you might forget that it's not enough to just put some hydrogen and some oxygen into a room together and wait. What most people don't think of, here, is that you need some kind of a spark to begin the reaction that is going to make the hydrogen and oxygen bond together. Thus, one might argue that unless you are going to be stealing - erm, borrowing - someone else's water, the spark is the most important thing.
Your online business is the same sort of thing - except that it's not as simple as just two elements and a spark. There are hundreds - maybe thousands - of elements that all go together in a perfect blend that makes for a successful web venture. One might look at "Twitter" as one of the great success stories of recent years on the Internet - but there is one key element missing: money. Despite it's amazing success, Twitter has yet to earn a dime. (Granted, Twitter is about to be valued at $1 billion - but what exactly are you getting for that price?) Many (such as I) believe that Twitter is a good idea that needs some great expansion and integration in order to maintain its speed, but in order to do that, there needs to be money.
Delegate Focus - Manage The Big Picture
One of the biggest and most common long-term failures I see on the web is task isolation. You have a bunch of coders in one room who make the back end of the web site do it's thing. You have a bunch of copy and content creators in another room who keep the front end of the site fresh and sticky. (Sticky is a term used to talk about how a web site makes visitors want to come back again and again.) Then, you have a bunch of marketers who work on their part of the site to take the site's traffic and turn it into sales, leads, or other "cash-flow" type objectives. And then, of course, you have your SEO team who looks at what everyone else has already done and says, "No! Change that, that, and that!"
Even when companies are good at determining objectives and goals for their web site, they will often take you through their site and say, "This page is for search engines, this page is for users, this page is to generate sales, and this page is where we handle our social networking blog and other off site marketing. The reason this happens is because the SEO people have their way to do things, so they need their own pages, and the copy writers have their own thing going on (and you don't want to step on the SEO people's toes!) and the marketers have their own thing and they don't want to get gummed up with all the other things.
What we end up with is a room full of hydrogen and oxygen - but we have no spark. There's nothing there to get everything to bond together and make a complete entity. Someone has to be able to look at that room and say, "Okay - Oxygen people, I need 4 units of O2. Hydrogen people, give me 8 units of your stuff and put it in this corner here. Now we have the recipe in place, it's time to light the spark!"
Without the proper elements coming together in the right balance with the right spark to get it all to merge together into the perfect machine to meet all your objectives. Without everyone working together in sync to get the right balance on every page, you don't end up with H2O - you might end up with H2O2 - which is great if you need to treat the cuts and bruises.
In order for your web business to be a success, you simply can't seperate all your tasks into separate entities. You might have a page that's great for search engines and ranks very well, but if it doesn't push the user forward once they land there, that top ranking is completely useless. It also does you no good to have a great page that helps all the users do exactly what they want to do if there are no users there to take advantage of it. You need to have one person (be it yourself as the web site owner, or somone with at least some skill in each of the areas important to creating your web site) who looks at the big picture and creates tasks that compliment and work well with each other.
If you don't manage the big picture before delegating the tasks, you will end up with lots of different and non-complimentary things going on.
More Elements - This Time it's Web Page Elements
Nowadays, search engines are getting better and better at identifying specific elements on a page and understanding it. They can identify your primary navigation menu and understand that just because the word "Home" is there near the top of the page, it doesn't mean that this page has anything to do with real estate, nor does it necesarily have a way to "Contact Us". They can identify sub menus, ad blocks, sections that provide links to what's new, persuasive content, product data, and so on.
This is only true, though, if you are consistent about it. If a certain "block" on a page has a certain task - it needs to do it consistently throughout the site or throughout a clearly defined section of the site.
On sites that have a good internal structure, the URL contains elements that help users and search engines understand the context of things as well. I talked about this in an article about URL Structure a few weeks ago.
At the end of the day, it is important that all the various teams have an idea of how their tasks work together with each other. They might not understand all the finer points of it, but content writers need to know specific protocols that they keep in mind so that their content meets the criteria set out by the SEO team in order to rank the page, and their stories contain the proper "next step" to get the visitors along the path-to-conversion once the content is read. Copywriters might also be required to categorize and tag things in a certain way to help the application/site structure developers happy so that the site organizes itself in a way that makes content easy for users to find, and easy for search engines to understand what's new, what is archived permalink content, and so on.
Everything effects everything. Unless you have someone on your team that has a good working knowledge of all aspects of what goes into a web site, something is going to be missing from the recipe. No - this person doesn't need to be a super PHP programmer with 10 years experience - but it would be really helpful if they'd taken a basic programming class or two so they can understand what goes into making a web site that performs in a specific way for a specific task. They don't need to know all the finer points of SEO, but they need to have a grasp on the basics so they can undestand how site structure, content, linking strategies, paths-to-purchase, and so on all interact with each other.
Then, of course, they need to be able to create the task lists in a way that the task for the SEO team compliments and integrates with the other tasks.
It's All About YOU
Hydrogen or Oxygen? Search Engines or Users? SEO, Marketing, Sales, or Sticky Freshness? Organization, Structure, Conversion Paths, Content, Customer Support, Credibility?
It's ALL important! Why? Because in order for you to be successful at your goals with your web site, you need to create (or delegate the creation) the perfect balance of all the factors that go into making your web site something that is going to take you from this point to the future you want to make for yourself.
You can pay experts to focus on the specific ingredients - and each of those experts are going to consider thier part of the task to be the most important. Someone into SEO is going to consider SEO the most important. Someone into usability will insist that that is the most important thing - and so on down the list.
The most important thing, really, is to understand that everything, in a perfect balance is what makes your success. The oxygen is no more or less important than the hydrogen when it comes to making fresh water. You have to have it all, and you need the right amount of all of it and have it in the right place at the right time with the right conditions to make it bond.
Last week, I talked about needing someone on the team who really cares (see "Who Loves You, Website?") but it's also important that that person also has the ability to see the big picture. They need to be a great Chef who can get all the people in the kitchen preparing the best ingredients and getting them all ready to make the ultimate gourmet meal. In the restaurant business, the Chef very rarely stands on the line and cooks - but he will step in to teach, or to help someone who is falling behind. He understands all the tasks and he spends his entire day making sure that each little thing goes together in the perfect way to create the ultimate experience that assures the success of the restaurant owner (that's you in this thinly veiled metaphor).
Final Thoughts
The main point of this article is to make sure that you don't become (or don't allow your web project manager to become) so focused on one aspect of things that other important ingredients get left out. Ideally, before you even start to build your web site, you'll come up with a plan that identifies all of the ingredients you are going to need to make your recipe for success, and then you will begin to prepare the recipe in a way that allows all the ingredients to compliment one another. Once something starts off in a bad direction with too much focus on one aspect, it can be very difficult, and costly to bring in the rest of the ingredients. You can't get a cake half baked and then remember to add the eggs.
Talk to lots of people - and if you are going to take this on yourself, go around and start reading the web site development blogs, check out the great development forums around the web (for me, the best web forum for understanding the big picture and how each thing integrates and compliments into each other thing is Cre8asite Forums - and not just because I'm a regular visitor there. I'm a regular visitor there because it's the best at seeing the big picture of it all and helping people develop recipes for success).
Even if you're not in charge of the whole thing, it is still a good idea to spend an hour or so a week keeping up with the basics from a variety of different sources. You might have a great project manager, but even the best of us can get off track - especially if one of the departments below them is more difficult to work with than another. You might notice that your manager adjusts their gameplan to avoid using that department where possible to avoid conflicts.
In the end, someone needs to be there to see the big picture. And that big picture is really very simple. The big picture is the recipe that creates the perfect web site to bring you to your goals and create your success.
