posted in search engine optimization on 30 June 2011
by Andrew Lang
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Web Developers Need SEO Skills Too

Making a website and marketing a website are different disciplines, but they are actually closely related due to the technical nature of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and PPC (Pay Per Click) marketing. You can't develop a website completely oblivious to SEO requirements without causing trouble down the line. A search engine unfriendly website is on death row from launch day. What's worse is that quite often the site owner is unaware of this until they've wasted months trying to promote a website that's just too incoherent to explain itself to search engine spiders, and/or is as repetitive as the most boring drunk you know (e.g. same HTML page titles for every page). Six months after launch, the site owner starts to worry about low numbers of visitors and sales, and hires an SEO company to do an audit on their site. Lo and behold, a lot of on-page optimization work is required. And of course, the site owner is relying on the SEO company either co-operating with the developer to make the changes, or attempting those changes themselves. It's not a great situation, and one that has rising costs. Also for PPC, you're more likely to get a low quality score (therefore pay more for each click) if your pages aren't properly optimised (i.e. semantic structure of content within each page so Adwords spiders can properly evaluate the page). More money down the drain.

This is why website developers need to have a very good knowledge of on-page optimization to make their websites search engine friendly from launch day. It's not going to guarantee success to their clients (there's link building to consider, the viability of the business plan etc), but it will answer all the tricky technical points of SEO so the client isn't paying two companies to properly finish one website.

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