Findability v SEO

25Mar08

In my last position at a university I was working in a marketing department. One of the big things on the agenda there was SEO. It seemed that every week a new agency was coming in to spruik their SEO wares. They could analyse the site, they could write a report, they could recommend changes that would put the site right up there in the search rankings, they could make your site number 1.

The problem was, the changes they always recommended seemed to be based on a set of rules that probably made sense at some stage but when placed in the context of a living, breathing, working website run through a CMS seemed unworkable at best and downright ridiculous at worst.

Every time I was asked to ‘action’ an SEO report I had to try to explain that making our site easy to find and easy to use wasn’t as easy as making a few changes as recommended by these companies. Some of the changes made sense but implementing them was never easy. There were so many variables and so many infrastructure changes required that most changes were almost never put into place. I didn’t have the resources and was powerless to change things like URL structures that had been in place for years. Sure, there was some of what I called ‘pimping’ of text and metatags to the SEO cause. This merely scratched the surface and I was always banging on at them to be wary of creating content that was great for search engines but nonsensical to humans.

What was required was a thorough understanding of why and how you make a website ‘findable’ as opposed to merely upping your rank in Google. This understanding had to be filtered out from some central point to CMS developers, designers and content owners. In a single organisation with decentralised content ownership and maintenance responsibilities we are talking about hundreds of people, not all of whom work on the web as their primary job.

My mind started spinning when I thought about what this all meant and how it could never really be achieved.

It was with some dismay then that I found Aarron Walter’s article on A List Apart. He describes ‘Findability’ as the orphan in the web development and design team and details a few ways in which each role in the team can make sites more ‘findable’. It’s too late for me to pass this on to my colleagues but if you find yourself in the situation where SEO has become the latest buzzword, you are getting pressured to turn your website into a bunch of searchengine-friendly keywords and to change things that are really beyond your control, you may like to take a look at it.

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Tags: findability, marketing, search, seo