Compromising Between Usability and Good SEO

Sometimes you may find that optimizing a site for search engines and also for the users experience clash. This is a bit ironic to say the least as search engines are designed to spider and index sites according to what they offer the user. As time goes on the gap between a good site and a search engine's perception of a good site will get smaller. In the mean time here is a real world scenario.I have been working on an e-commerce site recently and putting a lot of care an attention into the hierarchy of links and at the same time doing my best to ensure a positive and profitable user experience is had. Then I came to the issue of pagination. Pagination it self is put in place on many e-commerce platforms to increase usability. The problem with pagination is that quite often all of the pages which have been created are as relevant as each other. This creates an seo issue where if for example you have all products being listed alphabetically you end up with more potential traffic to your products beginning with A. Not good.The fact is, pagination is a older concept and should be looked at from a modern standpoint. Pages load quicker on faster internet connections, and where the defaults of say Magento or ZenCart might be to show 10 products at a time, most users would be much better off looking at say 50-100 at a time and scrolling vertically. My research has shown that as long as a page loads quickly users really don't mind scrolling vertically and they do so automatically.So, in conclusion I present my solution. Show more content or products and don't worry so much about pagination. Just optimize your product or listing images so they load quickly and you won't impact on site usability. A good tool to help you along the way is a JavaScript plugin called Lazy Loader. This will only load images in the view-port area of the browser instead of all at once (much like Facebook does on their ever scrolling wall).