How far should a webdesigner go with SEO

omega42

OK so a question I get asked a lot by people that I do a website for is

"Will I appear on the first page of google?"

While I design the site with SEO in mind, how far should I need to go.

Should I rewrite content for them?
Force a Blog on them that I know they will never use?

I do everything I can ie <h1>.... <alt>, CSS, page loading, etc but I cant give them a guarantee that they will appear high in google, because all that aside it still breaks down to content, but people getting a website for the first time don't seem to realise that.

I dealt with 1 person that just wanted pictures on the site, I ended up having to write content for them myself, for a business sector that I knew nothing about.

Should SEO be a service that all designers offer and charge a monthly fee for?

cormee

omega42 wrote: »

OK so a question I get asked a lot by people that I do a website for is

"Will I appear on the first page of google?"

While I design the site with SEO in mind, how far should I need to go.

Should I rewrite content for them?
Force a Blog on them that I know they will never use?

I do everything I can ie <h1>.... <alt>, CSS, page loading, etc but I cant give them a guarantee that they will appear high in google, because all that aside it still breaks down to content, but people getting a website for the first time don't seem to realise that.

I dealt with 1 person that just wanted pictures on the site, I ended up having to write content for them myself, for a business sector that I knew nothing about.

Should SEO be a service that all designers offer and charge a monthly fee for?

SEO should be built into the site, as you suggest. After hand-over it should probably be left to the experts - SEO professionals.

mneylon

Being conscious of it is key, though I'd be wary of offering it unless you knew enough to do it very well.

fc2060

Omega
I would agree with the two previous replies and also add the following comments.

1. I think every web developer should have a basic understanding of SEO. In the same way as a builder will have a basic understanding of plumbing. Building a website without thinking about SEO or without incorporating some of the important aspects of SEO is like building a house without toilet or heating and then coming back to the plumber and saying I have just built a house can you please put in a toilet, shower and central heating. The cost of incorporating this will be much more expensive than if it had been done from the outset. My analogy might be a bit dramatic but it's not too far off the point.

2. A simple example of what should be done at the outset is to identify the main keywords that are relevant to the business or website. ideally those keywords should be incorporated into the URL, rather than rely on the automatic generation of a url. The keywords should be in the title tag and H1 tag and appear in the text on the page. There should also be a meta description. The title tag and the meta description are also used by Google in the search engine results page.

3. Depending on the size of your budget you should appoint an expert in SEO. If you are building sites on a regular basis you can work with this company on all your sites and try to encourage your client to have a budget for this very important aspect of the development. Also it's not just something that needs to be built in at the start but SEO is an ongoing process

Fred

Trojan

You should build the site with best practices. Things like writing semantic HTML, source order formatting, human-friendly URLs/permalinks, and making the site accessible. Onsite SEO will be taken care of almost 100% if you do that.

(You'll need to do some SEO work like content planning and keyword research if you want to approach 100% for onsite SEO).

jmcc

Build good content that people want to read. SEO is nice but if the content is poor, then you won't have people coming back to the site. There are so many aspects to SEO and so much snakeoil floating about that designers should really just concetrate on designing and apply minimal SEO (as suggested above) where necessary.

Tweaking a site for every harebrained SEO "theory" that comes along is a waste of time. Given what I've seen from the monthly web surveys, it would be better if SMEs stopped treating their websites like brochureware that does not need to be updated. And as for designers, it would be better if they kept Joomla/WP installations and plug-ins current.

Regards...jmcc

tricky D

jmcc wrote: »

Build good content that people want to read. SEO is nice but if the content is poor, then you won't have people coming back to the site. There are so many aspects to SEO and so much snakeoil floating about that designers should really just concetrate on designing and apply minimal SEO (as suggested above) where necessary.

Tweaking a site for every harebrained SEO "theory" that comes along is a waste of time.

Put another way: write for your users, not for search engines (but do keep SEO in mind).

omega42

@jmcc & tricky D

but that's my point, is it up to a web developer to assist with content production or should they just create the site and get the client to provide the content.

If a client comes to you that know's very little about internet or even computers and ask's you for a site that will show up on the first page of google (which has happened to me) do you tell him that you can design a site capable of achieving that but it's up to the client to prepare content for the site that will benefit the seo of the site. In my experience (as limited as it it) a customer like this wants to just go to a one stop shop that will do everything for them, and if you can't they will move on to somebody that say's they can.

For a small time designer working on his own (not just me but all designers) should we all skill up to offer SEO?

TheMan80

SEO is not only a content

its also valid (proper html +css validation)
url building engine
those are basic,
and many many more,

Simple developer can give u only an option for matas no more, in best case exclusive metas for every single page, that's all
metas are no more than 5% of SEO job

SO if u need to make ur site really visible u need SEO professional u'd like it or not
and better if u hire it and choose strategy before ur developer starts working on the project

TheMan80

SEO is not only a content

its also valid (proper html +css validation)
url building engine
those are basic,
and many many more,

Simple developer can give u only an option for matas no more, in best case exclusive metas for every single page, that's all
metas are no more than 5% of SEO job

SO if u need to make ur site really visible u need SEO professional u'd like it or not
and better if u hire it and choose strategy before ur developer starts working on the project

stapolinhosting

One thing I didn't see mentioned for SEO is readability scaling.

Google will check the readability of your content as well as all the other accepts of SEO.

For example, this thread has a readability level of Intermediate according to Google.

murphaph

I think SEO is a job in its own right tbh. Our company (and the last one I worked for) has/had "SEO experts" to assist us developers with the SEO aspects. Some of the theories would conflict etc. so as already mentioned, IMO a developer should be mindful of valid HTML/CSS (but I wouldn't be a slave to it) and proper use of tags but not offer it as a service as it's often a case of experimenting!

Weird things can "punish" your ranking like very similar product pages being interpreted as duplicate content by google (last project was a price comparison site so near duplicate content is sort of to be expected!) and you simply can't be expected to keep up with all of Google's mood swings and develop at the same time. An agency or larger firm like ours (we aren't an agency, we develop our own sites for our own group of companies) would be expected to have SEO "competent" individuals assisting the developers but a one man band can only do so much IMO.