My idea

[Grumpus]

Personally I consider Search Engines to be another user of web sites.

Exactly.

And the trend in search engines nowadays is to step themselves up from indexing like a user from the mid 90's (where surfing the web was really just following links from site to site to site) to a more savy user of today who knows where to start to cut out the circuitous route toward the desired destination. It's the early days of this, but this whole Florida update thing is really nothing more than an evolution of the search engine as a more savy "web user".

If you focus a fair amount of your site planning on being usable for the search engines (the lowest common denominator when it comes to users) then you've also gotten a nice start on being usable to the real people. Heck, if a machine can figure it out, a person will be able to figure it out all that much easier.

G.


G.

[LazyJim]

Yup I like the philosophy of being usable for the search engines. However I think that part of SEO more akin to accessibility than usability.

There's a lot more to the human interface with your site that are far from mechanical and some of them affect overall usability. Some of them aslo rely on things like the user being able to see or think, and the browser correctly displaying what you want it to.

A good example of a non-mechanical usability feature is a metaphor. The most common metaphor on web sites is the button. Clicking a hyperlink is like pushing a button, if something on the page looks like a button you expect to be able to push/click it.

Another example is when u have a body of text that talks about a number of images/diagrams on the same page. It is good usability if you label the images for easier reference in the text, and it's even better in the reference in the text is a clickable and takes you straight to the correct image. (And would be bad usability to try and describe which image, like "second from the top" or something).