UPDATED May 2009

Did you create your site for the readers or the search engines?
I must ask, because i’ve been doing a lot of research recently (on various subjects) and I found many, many sites that seemed to be geared towards “the engines” instead of “the potential readers”.

It is a good thing to make your website/blog SE friendly, no doubt about that!
But are you sacrificing your readers/users experience, just to get better rankings?

I’ve browsed thru a lot of sites (some had relevant and interesting content) but couldn’t stay there more than 30 seconds!! Too much advertisement, banners, flashing stuff, hard to navigate, overall a poor users experience. That is something!

On the other hand, I found quite a bunch of sites (had to dig long to find those!) that were listed way down the search engines results pages, but god did most of those have great content!

But still, I found a bunch of sites that were relevant, interesting, user-friendly, SE-friendly, and on the first page of Google search results! So…many people are doing things right!

Why not make your site appealing and easy to use, thus enhancing the user’s experience (bookmarks, feeds.. more loyal readers!) and have relevant and interesting content while making the search engines happy? I believe that should be the ultimate goal!

Logically if your site is “search engine friendly”, well optimized, and if you market it actively (why not build a network of sites? there are many advertising solutions out there! do a Google search and you’ll get a truck load of results), make good decisions who you trade links with, and where you post your stuff, do things a little different, and creative, you should be able to have visitors coming to your site to check out your content (relevant content in your niche, that is).

Most importantly, have those visitors stay, read, bookmark, contact you, interact and share! Simply put, you should build you site for the users, make your site easy to navigate, but keep the search engines in mind!
imho