An interesting article (posted by vBSEO Staff)

[KURTZ]

http://tonyadam.com/blog/575-site-speed-reducing-page-load-times-and-increasing-pages-crawled/

so i need to redo completely my home page, and maybe turn off the forum icons product ... what do you think about?

 

[x3sphere]

I build my sites for the users posting on it, not for the search engines to crawl.
But I am just weird I guess.

Same, that's the way to do it. Too many people obsess over ranking, link-building, and the quality of their sites suffer as a result. But yeah, I think Google is trying to reverse this line of thinking with the site speed signal, in hopes that more will make strides towards enhancing the user experience. Still I've already seen people get carried away with it. Removing images on your site (like post icons) for instance is silly, and will not improve your ranking.

 

[Anthony Parsons]

I build my sites for the users posting on it, not for the search engines to crawl.
But I am just weird I guess.

Yep... if the software developer gets it fairly close to right out of the box, then all you should have to concentrate upon is building content and user discussion.

On the other hand though, when you want traffic, SEO is important to assist in the garnishing of that new traffic. Again... if the developer gets their end right, ie. fast loading pages, then the job is done for the user. I believe SEO is extremely important for the development cycle... that is where it should be left, as users with a little information tend to be quite dangerous and damaging to themselves.