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Hillbillies Feuding

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Ever since SEO started several years ago, there has been an on going battle between SEO and Design/Development teams. The main problem, site creation is backwards.

I have worked for different SEO/PPC agencies and have witnessed these issues with hundreds of clients. The problems arise mainly due to the design/development team will create a new site, or portion of an existing site, and after it is ready to go live they go to the SEO expert and say that the site is live and it now needs to be optimized.

Now SEO needs to have them rewrite the URLS’s, change the 302 redirects to 301’s, change the link text, and the biggest issue of all… having to add hundreds of words to the home page after the design/development just spent months tweaking the home page until it was just right.

When creating or making changes to a website, the design/development team should consult with SEO in 3 stages.

The first stage would be to discuss global issues and best practices with the design/development team. This is where you would discuss things like page naming, keywords to use in link text, and if content will be needed.

The second stage should be in the middle of the project to make sure things did not get missed.

Lastly, SEO should complete a full site analysis before the site goes live. Are 301 redirects needed from the old pages to the new? Do any categories need to be blocked in the robots.txt file? Etc…

I do not blame designers or developers for this feud. I think it mainly has to do with SEO still being relatively new to a marketing department. SEO becomes an after thought. Site is created and then someone says, “oh yea, we should have SEO take a look at this.” Then the hours, days, and months of tweaks occur which becomes frustrating for all involved.

So the lesson here today is to take your website design/development project chart and flip it upside, SEO first. Bottom line, we HAVE to work as a team. You can spend $100,000 on a new site, but it will not matter if no one can find the site. On the other side, SEO can bring tons of traffic, but if the site design/development sucks no one will buy.