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Posted: Wed Nov 08, 2006 1:07 am
by matthijs
I think it's not only one or the other. What do search engines want to do? Give the results to the user the userwants to see. In that sense, if you'd make the perfect site for your visitors (interesting content, relevant, user-friendly, etc) the search engines will do their best to get you on top of the result lists.

It's no coincidence that many tactics to improve the search engine friendliness of your site are the same tactics that benefit your users. To give a few examples:
- Relevant titles (h1,h2) containing the words people are looking for.
- Relevant link text ("information on green widgets" instead of "click here")
- Interesting and relevant text instead of flash-movies or bulky images
And of course when people find your site useful they will link to it, which the search engines see, etc.

So what I think is happening is that many webmasters start realising that their crappy, unusable websites are not doing well in the search engines. Because the search engines have improved and get the better sites at the top, the bad sites drop in the results. Suddenly the owners of these sites are forced to do something about that.

To answer your question "are search engines more important than your users?": for me, no. For many/some webmasters, yes.