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| Image Courtesy: FlyerTalk |
Historically,
web designers, developers and SEO professional enjoy a shrewish relationship. This
could be due to several reasons such as lack of understanding the best practice
of designing and developing a website, improper inter-department
coordination, knowledge gap, process deviation, and a high degree of micro-management.
The cantankerous is possibly due to the nature of their jobs, and core area of focus. A designer looks at a website from color’s perspective, a developer looks at a website from coding and functionality perspectives while SEO looks at a website from search engine perspective.
It’s obvious that a designer and
a developer’s success are hardly measured by ranking, and traffic of a website.
Whether a site ranks on Google or not, a developer or designer is hardly
made responsible. They work for different metrics with different KRAs set by an
organization.
A web designer
hardly revisits and reviews a website once they pass it on to the next phase of
development while most of web developers feel relieved once a website goes
live, for they believe that their job is over, with a big bash and pat. Any
additional changes, if proposed by SEO professional thereafter, are deemed as
low priority tasks. This causes a sloppy implementation, half-hearted efforts,
and a lack of focus being given to address SEO issues.
Neither do they have a direct
stake nor does management blame them for a site's poor performance on search
engines. All roads then lead to Rome, SEO scapegoat!
Quite often, we confront this question - "If developer knows SEO tidbits,
then why are SEO professionals needed? What are expected from them?" To our understanding,
SEO is comprised of various elements. SEO starts with a good design, usability,
development, code standards, web layout structure, content, and on-page &
off-page. The core job of SEO is to continue adapting to the changes in Google
algorithms, recommending new techniques such as
rich snippets, dis-vow links, and Google+ Authorship, users’ rating, trusted
program, social analytics, web analytics, data interpretation, focus on search
engine visibility, tag management, and so on.
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| Image Courtesy: Under World Magazines |
Practically speaking, SEO’s core focus is not to advise the best practices of developing a site from SEO
perspective unless it’s required. If they do it for a developer’s knowledge, credit to SEO professionals for taking such academic step in an organization
to train them. Furthermore, recommending
complex technical changes compatible with search engine is also not the core focus
of SEO professionals. If they do this, they simply clean your (developer)
mess, for which you (developer) must appreciate him/her for helping you
(developer) in writing clean code.
Summary:
Summarizing with Cristian D. and J. Sirovich, who in
their book
clearly mention “SEO is not only the job of the marketing department. It
must be considered from a web site′s inception and throughout its lifetime
by you, the web site developer.”
It’s thus imperative
for all developers to know SEO best practices on programming side. And, its equally important for designers to lay emphasis on great designs, layouts and graphic elements than simply designing
an insipid layout for immediate delivery of a project. In a service based industry,
concept sells, and what matters more is impeccable execution of “concept” to
deliver a “market ready product”. Wearing a marketing
hat for creating a market ready website is a responsibility of developers
and designers, for the core focus of a marketing department is to market a “market
ready” product and not to involve too
much in making a product market ready!