I’ve been saying for a while that every site has two audiences: people and search engines. And you have to plan for both. But if you design for people first, the search engines will follow (though you have to still keep the se’s in mind!)

Well, today I read a Q&A from Jill Whalen entitled Creating Good Content for SEO and Your Users. The concern was:

I am very worried. I had about 200 pages on my site and recently added about 300 more pages of good content. I did have lots of very good top 10 rankings, but they have all disappeared and now traffic is less than half of what it was.

As Jill explored what happened, her conclusion was:

So was RK trying to “spam” the search engines?

I don’t really think he was; I just think he didn’t get it. He probably read at some forums that the more content he had on his site, the more likely he would get found.

But pages generated solely for the search engines do *not* constitute good content…

It’s a good short article worth reading. Don’t fall into the trap of designing just for a Search Engine.