SEO sure is great for almost any kind of website and it definitely could be the deciding factor for the fate of some websites, however can you really afford to give more priority to optimize your site for Google than for your clients? Some webmasters are so focused on search engine optimization that they do not realize that its done at the expense of web browsability & user-experience. While it may get them a lot of free visitors from the search engines, it may not be worth it, and eventually be damaging if the visitor loyalty reduces.

I?ve come across this interesting article on Matt Kelly?s speech ?Put SEO in its place?. Matt Kelly is the associate editor of The Mirror and he talks about how they used SEO to increase traffic for their newspaper. He believes that all journalists and newspapers should ignore SEO and focus primarily on providing stories that are more readable to the users. The article was a good read and the author has some valid points, but I think his personal experience with SEO has instilled some sort of negativity with it. If optimizing the website (Mirror.co.uk) caused such huge increase in inflow of targeted visitors ? that is the sign that SEO actually worked for them and not otherwise. If they were unable to monetize that surge in traffic, SEO is not the factor to be blamed, but rather they should have taken the opportunity to analyze their own human & other resources to see why they were unable to earn from that traffic, and possibly considering hiring an online content monetizing expert.

Matt blames SEO for the fall in their advertising rates, as SEO led to considerable increase in traffic which in turn caused a fall in their advertising rates? and the reason he states is of one of the basic principles in economy “massively oversupplying a finite market generally leads to a collapse in value”. True, more supply & stagnant demand leads to a fall in prices, but if we are blaming SEO for getting a site too much traffic and a subsequent fall in advertising rates, then why not blame it for rising hosting costs as well?

Yes I agree with Matt Kelly when he writes that news portals should not churn out content only for the search engines and rather design their website and content with the users in mind. I was a regular reader of their articles and I did notice a consistent fall in value of the quality of content, and so I agree with his statement ?In treating SEO as the be-all and end-all of online publishing, we devalued our content in the mind of the users? .

I believe there is always a possibility of achieving a balance in a website, a balance the search engines are happy to crawl and index your website while the visitors enjoy reading and digesting the content as well. I am not supporting SEO just because I specialize in it. Lets face it, we all are Googlers. We are so used to searching that many of us actually even google the URL itself. Dont believe me? Ask the 45 million users who search ?youtube.com? on Google every month. I think no website or business should undermine or ignore the potential of search engine traffic. Achieving that ?balance? is the key in my opinion and although not very easy, it is definitely not impossible to achieve.