Is a good user experience essential to get your website a high ranking in search engine results? It may well be.

Over time, search engine optimization tactics have changed as the search engines have become more sophisticated. You can’t count on things you did yesterday to have the same results tomorrow. Good title tags? Sure, you have to keep giving your pages good titles, but now you have to make sure people are linking to your site.

The search engines’ goal is to provide you with exactly what you need when you use their search engine, and it is in their best interest to use the best techniques available. Any SEO tactic is probably going to have a limited life not simply because they wants to stay one step ahead of the rest of us, but also because improving technology allows them to do their job better.

So, if we assume that Google wants to provide its users with the most relevant websites, and that the specifics of how they determine relevancy are going to continue to evolve, then maybe it follows that the best long-term strategy for ranking high in search results is to create a site that actually is relevant. To have a site that speaks the same language that your users do. To make a site that’s valuable and leads them to come back and to tell their friends about it.

Of course, SEO tactics are still going to matter. Until the day comes when computers can really understand the meaning of your site, you’ll still have to work to expose what your site is about to search engines. I’m thinking that user centered design, that getting your site right for the people that you want to reach, may be the right place to start SEO efforts.