SEO Developers

[Silly888]

I have a team of inexperienced SEO developers and the argument we continually have is that its a marketing role - however most of it is technical, no view state, no js, page load time, csssprite, metatags, frequency of updates to server, duplicate content via coding methodology, lioading content prior to ads, not spidering ads (IT says impossible yet google says required) etc.

I looked at your referrals for developers and couldnt find any that recognized SEO as part of their skill set - do you believe tehre aer developers that specialize in this?

Thanks,

Michelle

[john4math]

Good developers should do a lot of these things by default, like optimize page load time, use sprites, avoid duplicate content, load page content prior to ads, etc.  A good SEO should be aware of all of these things, and when things need to change, should be able to communicate those changes to a developer.  Identifying these issues are more on the SEOs themselves, not the developers.  In my experience, most tasks are more front-end tasks, and a few are back-end, so depending on what your developer does, they should be able to handle the tasks within their niche if you point them out.

I don't think they need to put "SEO" in their skill-set.

[Silly888]

Thanks - Do you know how to have the robots not crawl the DART code - as my developer is saying that is not possible.  Also would you expect IT and marketing access your tools or marketing only?

Thanks, Again,

Michelle

[john4math]

Sorry, but what is DART code?  Looked around a bit but couldn't find any info about it.

Depending on what you want IT and marketing to do... mostly I monitor the tools, and tell marketing and IT what needs to be done.  I don't think IT would need to be in there, you should probably be able to tell them what changes need to be made without them digging through data and reports.  Marketing could use tools to find good keywords to target, and especially if they do link building to find opportunities for that.

[Silly888]

DART is the industry standard software used to serve ads on a site.  Google webmastertools indicates that ads should not be crawled utilizing the robot text function.

I admistrate mopst of this software as a marketer but several items such as page speed, etc are out of my range of skills.

[john4math]

It sounds like they want you to disallow those components in your robots.txt file to keep them from getting indexed by search engines.  Here's what the Google Webmaster Help says about robots.txt.  If the ads are in an iframe, you can disallow the page the iframe points to.  If it's an Flash file for example, and the link is in the Flash, you can block robots from indexing any of these ads if you put all of them in their own directory.  For ads that will get indexed (if they're in the HTML), if you put a "rel=nofollow" on the links, I think search engines consider that enough?

For page speed, there are a few free tools people to help with page speed.  In Chrome, you can install Page Speed.  You can install the add-on in Firefox as well if you've installed Firebug first.  This will test your page and give you a list of things you can do to improve performance.  Once it's installed, you can have it test any page on your site, and it'll give you a list of things to do to improve performance.  Another similar Firefox add-on I haven't had much experience with is YSlow.

[AlanBleiweiss]

one option is to have all ad code in separate files that get loaded  on page-view, through an include.  If you then place all ad files in their own folder, you can then noindex the entire folder in the robots.txt file.

Engineering and Marketing go hand - in - hand regarding SEO.  What engineers say is "impossible" regarding SEO is due to their lack of specific methodology and the human condition that tends to cause people to instantly conclude that if they have never done it, never seen it done, or never been shown, then it must be impossible.

This is an existential concept common with people who are extremely logic oriented.  Rather than arguing, it's much more efficient to do the research, and find the answers.  Only at that point is it then wise to go back and say - here's a way it can be done.  Show them links to actual blog articles or discussion forum pages where the topic is discussed, if need be.

It comes down to understanding that it's a teaching moment, with no ego involved.  Purely educating others, so everyone can work together for the common good.