Maybe I’m being a bit provocative here, but I don’t see SEO as a viable industry long-term.
Would you hire a company to produce a shoddy TV commercial for you just to turn around and hire a TV commercial optimization company to fix it?
If not, why would you be amenable to such a scenario with your web site? It just doesn’t make sense.
Search engine friendliness, as well as usability, should both be core competencies of the web developers. Don’t hire a web vendor that isn’t going to do a proper job of the website development from the get-go — including making the site “sing” for the search engines.
SEO isn’t a black art like Seth Godin opines. It’s scientific, measurable, and testable. And there’s a wealth of information online about SEO, freely available. There’s no excuse for a web design firm to deliver anything but a website that’s been optimized for search engines.
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Good point. It doesn’t make sense to build a web site only to have someone later have to optimize it. However, that really only covers making sure a site is indexable. Web developers don’t write copy, and they generally prefer focusing on coding or graphic design than figuring out what search terms the prospective customers of a business use to describe the business’ services or products.
I’ve had conversations with web developers who do understand SEO and include search engine friendliness on their list of design features. Yeah, it’s nice, but it’s not a key feature for most businesses when researching designers. Unfortunately, it’s more common for businesses to build a site, then start thinking about traffic. It’s a strange way to build a business, but that’s largely how it’s done. I can’t imagine someone renting retail space without taking store traffic into consideration, but it happens online every day.