Should you trust SEO to your web-designer? :: Not all nerds were made equal

We get a lot of customers who come to Netregistry that have had their web designer ‘optimise’ their site. The fact that they’re coming to us tips you off to where I’m going with this…

SEO is one of the fastest growing areas in the IT industry and more and more businesses now realise that without a marketing strategy for their site, the only people who will make money from it will be the developer and the hosting company. In light of this, many web designers are trying to offer “SEO” services with the site design, or at least including it in the cost. Having seen literally hundreds of website that have come to us ‘optimised’ by a web designer, not one of them was even near its potential.

The first major issue with a web developer doing SEO is that they generally come from the point of view that SEO is merely an exercise in code. They believe you can choose a loose set of keywords, stuff them in the title of the pages and into the text of the site and you’ll rank well. Complete myth. And even if you do manage to rank temporarily, without a strategy behind the campaign it doesn’t matter if you’re at the top as you won’t sell anything.

The next thing I see all too often is content editing systems added to sites that allow only the most basic editing. They’re all dynamically driven and often spit out unreadable URLs that search engines will never find. If you know nothing about websites and you can use your content editing system easily, chances are it’s not SEO friendly. These same systems are usually added by web developers who claim to have SEO in mind.

The old adage, ‘you get what you pay for’ comes to mind. If SEO is “thrown in” as part of the package, chances are it won’t be given the measured consideration that it needs in order to work for your business.

So is your site really SEO friendly?

• Is there a sound keyword strategy around the site?
• Does you designer have any marketing background?
• Was there any thought give to the navigation of the site?
• Was there any discussion of conversion goals on the site?
• Do you have plenty of text on the site or is it all images?
• Were there any analytics tools installed on the site to base future changes on?