What is going to make people seek out your website, not just click on a link in search result pages? That’s the key question that you need to focus on. Dave asked me this earlier this week and it’s exactly the right perspective.

In the long run, I think that the best way for a website to maximize its SEO performance is for it to maximize its value to users. This isn’t a reason to ignore SEO best practices; you can’t afford to do that. The bottom line, however, is that if you are a site users care about, search engines will figure out how to send people your way.

Making sure your pages are set up well and that navigation and page titles reflect the content is important, but you need to view SEO traffic as gravy. Now don’t get me wrong - there’s nothing wrong with liking a lot of gravy, but there’s got to be something underneath it. (And yes, I realize that’s a horrendous metaphor.)

With all that being said, Google is an important driver of traffic (duh) and you should make sure that you design a positive experience for users who find you through search. Succeeding at this creates a great virtuous cycle. You get more users, search engines view you as a higher quality site, you show up in more search results, you get even more users…you get the idea.

This sounds awesome. What’s the catch? It’s the whole “design a positive experience” part. No matter how you approach your business, you can’t get away from delivering value to users. Google has to be able to understand your site and index it, but it’s your users’ opinion of your site you need to worry about.