In the war of attrition for search engine rankings, many forget to count the human cost.

For most companies it is essential that their website appears at least somewhere on the first page of Google's results if it is to succeed in b ringing them new customers.

But what price will their website have to pay to get there?

Google's indexing robots aren't interested in having a great brand experience. They will ruthlessly assess a site's content and that of the sites that link to it, and mathematically work out its worth.

They won't be impressed with your ethos, associate with your products or become l oyalty to your brand. Humans of course, bless them, will.

But as sure as chickens follow eggs, where robots have been humans will follow.

This is the paradox web designers face: The need for a 'boring', information-led, content-rich website which gets the visitors in, yet still delivers a compelling user experience once they arrive.

For online retailers it is clear which side of the paradox they need to stay. Good extensive product information with little graphic distraction will win over humans as well as indexing robots.

If your website isn't about selling online, should you sacrifice search engine rankings for a better brand experience?

The answer is no, not if our only ideas for impressing visitors is to animate your logo and create some allegedly 'funky' menu system that takes users ten minutes to fathom out.

Only purely creative companies like design studios, whose offering is creativity itself, can be so indulgent. And perhaps the so called 'super brand', like Coke, McDonalds and Nike, can get away with this too as we can all guess their web addresses without having to look them up on Google.

For the less famous, compromise is needed.

Although search engine optimisation (SEO) need not completely wreck your site. Some SEO specialists would have you fill your home page with repetitions of your targeted keywords and change your page headings and titles to match.

Not too much repetition, mind you or Google's robots will get suspicious and bounce your website down the rank-ing, if not off it completely.

Theoretically, the robots are supposed to know what we humans will like.

With perhaps the exception of Google's latest "Big Daddy" release, they are slowly getting it right and it is becoming increasingly more difficult for SEO's to find quick ways to fool them.

Ultimately, the SEO specialists will become redundant and all web designers will have to do is build good human friendly sites, fill them with valuable content and watch them float to the top of the search engines.

Perhaps now is the time to start thinking more about human visitors than our robot friends.

* Chris is managing director of Internet consultancy WAA WebXpress. This and other unedited articles can be found at webxpress.com. E-mail chris@webxpress.com. ..SUPL: