WebProNews

Just because a website can be optimized and marketed for prime search success doesn't mean that it should.

Sullivan, Berg, Spar On Sphinn

An above-the-fold placement in Google's search results should be a part of the website equation, rather than the whole reason for reworking a website. Kim Krause Berg puts a word in for usability on her Cre8PC blog.

In making her point, Berg also took a shot at Sphinn, a Digg-like social media site launched by Danny Sullivan's Third Door Media:

The focus is strictly on search engines, search optimization and marketing, and social media. There is no welcome mat for people in the industry, such as myself, who support SEO/M efforts by taking web sites and Internet applications to the next step. The emphasis at Sphinn is on search results, not customer results.

There’s an “Other” category, but I refuse to be an Other. There are those few of us tied to the SEO industry whose skills work user centered design, usability, persuasive design (i.e marketing), accessibility and site functionality (software testing) into web sites that are optimized for search engines.

She doesn't plan to take in the SMX conference series either, as an extension of the SEO versus SEM orientation Berg possesses. After criticizing Sullivan for having usability in his programs at the SES conferences and not SMX, he responded in the comments:

On SMX versus SES, frankly, you are unfair. You like the usability programming at SES? And who has been doing that programming? That would be me. But you somehow think I’d ignore usability for SMX. Don’t mistake a focused show like SMX Advanced for what we will do in the more broadbased general show. Geez, you condemn an entire conference series based on two focus shows? Just unfair.

I know the concern that usability seems second to search at many shows. The reality is that usability is so important that you can and people do have entire shows about it. And guess what? Those shows don't dive into search in depth because they don't have room to do both deep. Yet I don't recall rants that they ignore search

The usability issue sounds more like a separate design/development concern than either search optimization or marketing, though it's easy to see how solid usability could enhance the conversions coming from search placements, paid or unpaid.