A friend forwarded a link to an article about how website designers keep Search Engine Optimizers in business.
It’s a great article and oh-so-true.
The real lesson here is designing and building a website and doing SEO (Search Engine Optimization) aren’t completely separate tasks. There’s an enormous wasted effort if the website developers don’t know and understand SEO. In fact, you may have to throw out the entire site construction and start over to get search engine rankings!
It is true that we don’t usually start a major SEO project on a website until it’s been up online for at least a month or two. There’s a couple of reasons for this. One is the sandbox effect. The other is the simple fact that until a site has been up for a while, you won’t have enough statistical track on the site to be able to do intelligent SEO.
Nevertheless, when a site is built there are two important targets relating to SEO:
1. The site should be search engine friendly. That means it should be built so that the search engines can find it, will be able to read all the copy, tell what the site is about, and will index the whole site.
2. The site should be SEO friendly. That means the site isn’t going to require restructuring or other major changes to get SEO done.
A good example of the difference is sites built using some Content Management Systems (CMS). They are search engine friendly – but impossible to do SEO on. In other words, yes, Google can see and will index the site, but the system doesn’t, for example, allow you to set individual title tags for each page.
A website designer who doesn’t know SEO is likely to violate one or both of these targets.
For clarity, we call making sites that DO satisfy these targets, “Basic Search Engine Optimization.”
Since it takes no more work to do basic SEO on a site, any website designer who doesn’t know SEO well enough to deliver that when he designs and builds a site, is ripping off his clients.
My opinion.
SEO Friendly Websites
