For a long time, optimising for search engines and optimising for users were two different jobs. However, as search engines have become ever more sophisticated, the two tasks have moved closer together. Now there’s actually a case for saying that your best long-term approach to SEO would simply be to make your website purely with users in mind.

The reason for this is that the raison d’etre for search engines is to direct people towards the web page that is most useful to them. Step one for a website is therefore to provide this. Everything else is simply a way of highlighting it.

The process of drawing attention to your site and its pages will never be redundant, but if we look back over some older SEO tactics, we can see how redundant they now are. Think of keyword stuffed pages and ‘optimised’ page titles. These tactics worked for a short period of time, but they weren’t designed for users and they are now redundant. In contrast, good site architecture and unique content offer something of value to users and so these approaches aren’t likely to fall by the wayside.