What do web designers consider to be SEO

[FDC]

I'm putting together an article about Web Designers and SEO. The basic crux is that most designers will at most (if you are lucky) add in title tags, maybe pretty URL's and HTML links and call it SEO friendly. (lot's who don't probably but also lot's who are even worse)

Of course I want it to be a bit controversial so please feel free to let rip. My argument is clients who have previously had site's that have had "SEO on them", know think that all SEO is a waste of time as their previous experience didn't produce the traffic and sales they were expecting. I don't know many designers who independently consider a site marketing strategy and how a site is going to generate links in the long term.

I'm sure most of us have read this post on SEO responsiblities but becasue the first port of call for most business owners are the web designers, our offering is undermined by their misunderstandings and in some cases mis-sellings.

So under the working title, "Why Web Designers Are Bad For SEO", any care to share some imput.

[AlanMosley]

I consider everything on the page a SEO Factor. I agree with your comments

I hate the word Web Designer, I refer to me self as a computer programmer or maybe Web Developer, Web design while important comes last when building a site for SEO.
I believe that how you build a website is very important to SEO, getting a Wordpress site with all its problems and then going out and getting links is not a good way to rank. Its hard to change a badly built site, get it right from the start.
I have used this analogy a few times, but I will use it again.
If a fisherman has holes in his net, he has to do a lot more fishing than a man that does not.
If you have violations in your website then you have to do a lot more link-building than a man who does not.
Firstly I use ASP.MVC to create my sites, with its routing engine to create User friendly URLs and its very clean code gives to a head start from the beginning.

Duane Forrester from Bing did a blog article on the order of things to do when building a site. The first 2 things were
Crawlability
Site structure
2 things very few sites consider.
http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2011/08/19/18-things-you-need-to-know-about-seo.aspx

Crawlability is the big one, you need to get your site free from all Violations. I us the Bing SEO Toolkit to test my site, I have never found another site to get a perfect score, most sites have thousands to hundreds of thousands of violations,  Alessandro Catorcini , Lead Program Manager, Bing API said the same thing on Whitboard Friday.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-interview-the-bing-team

Site structure, you need to know where you are pushing the link juice, each link changes the rank of all your pages, you need to think carefully when designing your site structure.

I like to keep my sites simple as possible for the main ranking pages, semantic markup, and using microdata to mark up entities into rich snippets, no bells and whistles, and no Flash

You must describe your content to the search engine.

Make the SE love crawling your site, clean descriptive code free from all violations.

Then you have content hierarchy followed by , keyword, on page factors and the other things i think we are all clear on.

[RobertFisher]

Alan, 
Well done, thanks for the links to the bing blog.

[AlanMosley]

It can be a good read.
Duane forrester is much more revealing than Matt Cutts, and he will return your comments and questions, well some of the time, Its very hard to get a answer out of matt.

[RobertFisher]

I think Alan has laid out a lot in his response. One thing that I tell clients going in is that there is a thing called an SEO friendly site, meaning that it had some of the basic SEO work done, but SEO is not a static process. Because the web changes, because peoples needs and queries change, because the rules the search engines apply all change, the website must be capable of changing as well.

The issue you raise is not black and white though. I will tell you that my chief developer is an excellent developer and he will tell you he learned more about SEO upon coming to our firm than he did in his previous position of three years. His role was with a design firm. I cannot build a website beyond the most rudimentary and it would be ugly. He can and with the two of us working together we do a good to great job.

You cannot have a website that is a slave to a designer/developer where they must be called to do something each time you need a change. (Frankly, of all our clients we only have two where we work with outside developers any longer as it became too much of a hurdle to try and get changes made). So, CMS is a must for most sites. Many designers do not want to relinquish control and that is part of the rub with SEO. As you stated, if they already built the site, where does that leave you?

You must educate the client in the basics and how you are going to proceed. If you are at a hurdle: Client wants to know what's wrong since they are ranking first for "gasoline go kart engines route 6 Tampa, Fl." or client states we never ranked before this company and now we are number 2 on Google for NNNN. You have to ask them questions around keywords  and be prepared to show them analytics, ask about ROI, etc.

One last thing and its a big one: Since you are speaking of web designers and SEO pros, if you are going into see a client for the first time...have a lot more questions than answers. Become the teacher that leads with questions.

Looking forward to the article.

[AlanMosley]

I can sympathise with you about trying to work though other developers,
Telling them there site is not perfect, is like telling them their kids are ugly.
I remember telling a client his web site was absolute crap, before I asked who made it for him, my wife was the answer, but we got past that awkward moment.
I only do SEO on sites I build myself, I am not interested in fixing problem sites that others were paid to make.

[FDC]

"their kids are ugly". Made me chuckle that.

Unfortunatley, I'm working at an agency and pretty much all their sites they built (who are now SEO clients) are "ugly". It's not obvious stuff to the uninitiated but stuff like canoncialized home pages, poor site architecture and not a drop of keyword research in site. Hey ho.

Point of my article is going to be that clients should approach an SEO/SEM first then do the web build and not the other way round. Fed up of people having a downer on SEO's becasue they've had some web desinger sell them SEO when they've not thought a jot about a long term marketing plan and they're annoyed that there brand new site hasn't made them a shed load of cash within a few months of being launched.

[EugeneF]

I do SEO work for a Web Designer with emphasis on the word "design".   The issue that come up most often is the conflict between graphic design and content "text".  designers want the site to look pretty, sometimes at the expense of content.  Designers are happy when I mess with meta tags and link structure.  Not so much when I want content added.

[AlanMosley]

I often have to tell clinets that they need a new site, no one wants here that, but i tell them straight, and point out that every so many extra sales will pay for it.

[AlanMosley]

Messing with his masterpeice.

[FDC]

This is the problem eh, doing what we do often means undoing someone elses hardwork. But great point Eugene, the hadn't thought about the battle lines between our needs and the effects that can have visually.

[FDC]

Thank you everyone for helping out. The article has gone live at Sitepoint. http://www.sitepoint.com/why-seo-comes-first/ .

Hopefully you chaps agree with what's being said. Clearly I'm trying to get a bit of a rise from web developers but we shall see if they "bite" at all.

Thanks guys.

[AlanMosley]

Good article, but I like to think of myself as an exception, I have been a developer since the beginning of the internet. About 5 years ago I was working for a firm that wanted a developer to liaise with a SEO firm they had hired. I quickly found that the SEO’s had little knowledge of development and visa versa the developers had little knowledge of SEO. Since that time I have thought about building sites to rank from the ground up.  The natural path of this pursuit led me to make fast lightweight sites, well organized with clear semantic clean coded html. I think you hit the nail on the head with the, what comes first argument. One really must do a lot of picking the brains of the site owners head, and find out just what they want the site to do. Often they really don’t know yet, but its not worth starting until they and you know what the final out come should be