My comments on Shari Thurow’s article on Identifying SEO Experts received pretty harsh feedback from Shari herself. She disagreed with my view that usability isn’t a primary function of SEO.
Again, I want to re-iterate my point, usability is a very important aspect to the overall marketing of a website to the search engines, but SEO, strictly speaking, is not about marketing, its about achieving top rankings. I also believe that SEOs that forsake usability in order just to get top rankings for their clients are not serving their clients well. Both are important, I just think usability is a marketing function over an optimization function.
Anyway, this debate seems to have flared up in other places as well. Cre8teasite Forums has a thread discussing this very issue which lead to a post on SEO Roundtable.