Web designers still cling to the belief that good usability cannot coexist with search engine optimisation. While SEO is an online marketing strategy that is used to improve the organic listing of a website in the search engine results, usability focuses on the user's experience. The misguided belief that good usability cannot exist except at the expense of SEO indicates a fundamental lack of understanding of SEO and search engines in general. Good SEO recognises only a high ranking as the outcome of the optimisation process. Usability can be easily incorporated into a web design strategy that focuses on SEO.

Let us look at some tactics that fall between good usability and good SEO. These serve as an important reminder that the two aren't mutually exclusive.

Internal Navigation
When content is added to a site, it is vital that there is interlinking between relevant pages. This helps search engine spiders to locate content that they may not actually find through the site's navigation. Hyperlinks within content are known to have great SEO value. On the usability end of the spectrum, internal links within the content direct human visitors to other content that they might find relevant. Whether it's an explanation of a phrase or a definition of an obscure word, internal navigation helps visitors better understand your content.

CSS
Cascading Style Sheets make websites much faster to load, uniform and easier to modify. The shorter load time reduces the wait for human visitors, especially important for the traffic using older and slower connections. Furthermore, CSS allows the SEO company to place keyword-rich content higher up the page and with streamlined maintenance of web pages designers can focus on creating better content.

Header tags
Formatted content helps human visitors make sense of the massive blog post that has just been uploaded. Arranging text content with the header tags, h1, h2, etc. provide readers with clues to the content in the paragraphs that follow. Similarly, a search engine spider uses the tags to get a sense of the content on the page, except there's a catch. The headings provide keywords that the search engines index the page content with. Thus, header tags have both usability value and help with SEO.

Usability consulting marks a new shift from the traditional and flawed view that SEO and usability were somehow independent of each other. The aim behind a highly usable website is to improve the user's experience, not different from the aim of any major search engine.