Didn’t My Web Designer “SEO” my Site?

Simple answer: No.

Your web designer didn’t “SEO” your website.  If you are asking this very reasonable question, your search engine rankings probably aren’t where you expected.  There are other possibilities but mostly you’ll be in one of these situations:

1. Your web designer is either a good or bad web designer but he is clueless about SEO.

2. You gathered quotes from people charging €3,000+, €1,500 ish and from someone offering a business website for €550.  You chose the €550 one and talked him down to €400.

3. You got a fully professional job done and you even found a designer with some SEO knowledge and he did a great job.

I’m going to go into each of these scenarios to explain where you are if this is you.  If you are in the third group you can be justifiably smug.  Your site still hasn’t been SEO’d because there is no such thing but the ongoing SEO should be off to a decent start.

Quick Note: If your site is an online shop or similar you’ll notice that your quotes were probably double these ranges or more.  If you are developing a custom web application, probably more than 10 times the figures discussed here and the whole templated €550 option probably doesn’t even have a comparison.

1. Your web designer is clueless about SEO

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  You could have a perfectly good web designer who is not an SEO and that is fine.  If you were sold the notion that all they have to do is bung in the tags to fool Google, you are probably in this group.  In fact, if you were sold the notion that they would build you an SEO’d website they probably don’t get it.

You could have anything from one of those ridiculous flash websites to a design based on a cool splash page or you might have a modern, standards compliant well designed site.  If you are lucky, your site is not doing anything to obstruct your SEO.

2. You went for the €550 job

I have no problem with people selling cheap templated web designs for low cost.  I wouldn’t buy one for my business but that is a decision that the customer has to make for themselves.  What you do have to understand though, is that you can’t have it all and get it for nothing.  Times are hard and you might have found someone in the €1,500 range who needs the work and puts so much into building you a good site that they’re working for under minimum wage.  I’m pretty sure that’s happening.  Even at considerably below minimum wage the cheapest sites you’ll see advertised can’t possibly include time to provide a unique design and then go on to think seriously about site structure, user experience, conversions, content planning and SEO.  Just designing a unique site and getting it into HTML is days of work.

Again, it is possible that your cheap templated site has done you no harm and is search engine ready.  It’s not likely that it’s the kind of site I would advise but it may not have any SEO nightmares. 

3. You got a fully professional job done by a designer who knows SEO

Congratulations.  Why are this group still in an article about not having an SEO’d site?  Because, in your best case scenario what you have is a site that is search engine ready (search engine friendly?).  The technology of the site is probably good for the search engines.  The navigation is spiderable.  You might have search engine friendly urls.  There is sufficient space and prominence given to content.  You can enter and alter the Title tags and the descriptions of the pages.

If you have spent extra money for SEO work to be done, you can expect to have been asked about your visitors, to have received some keyword research, to have put some serious thought into site structure and maybe even content.  Some work will have been done to target particular keywords on relevant pages.  They will have written Title tags and optimised other on-page elements.  Some link building has probably been done.

Didn’t Your Web Designer SEO Your Site?
If you are in a situation where you are wondering “Didn’t my web designer SEO my site?”, you are in a very common situation.  You expected your site to be built in a way that would get you on Google.  You might even have been sold this notion.  This is not your fault but there are some things you need to learn about how the web works and these can help your website make you sales. 

If you have this problem and you want to fix it, here is the first thing you need to understand:

Search Engine Optimisation is an ongoing process.  There are aspects that are built into the design, coding and setup of your site and these are important but SEO is not something that is done once.  It is something that is done all the time.

One thing that everyone who asks this question has in common is this:

Your site is not where you want it to be.

If that is your situation then your first step is to find out where you are. 

• Is there something about your site that the search engines don’t like?  
• Or are you off to a good start but you need to do more work? 
• Where does that work need to focus?

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Tags: seo, web design

This entry was posted on Friday, July 23rd, 2010 at 12:15 pm and is filed under SEO Information. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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