Why Developers & Designers Shouldn’t Do SEO!

March 26, 2009 // Author: Jacob Stoops // 157 views // View Comments

There are many reasons why you shouldn't trust that your designers and/or developers are doing a good job "building in" your website's SEO.

I was asked to write about the reasons why having a web developer/designer handle your SEO at the time of development is not enough. This may seem trivial, but I run into it regularly.

Many times, I start talking about SEO and the potential client feed me stuff like, “oh, my web developer handled that.” Well, I’m here to tell you this, developers / designers that know SEO is the exception, not the rule!

The Issues

Mention the word SEO around developers / designers and I’m sure they will say they get it, but it is usually with a groan, or a “sort of,” or a “kind of” type response. Here are two reasons why I think developers aren’t the best options to run SEO campaigns:

1. They Don’t Have Time.

A good SEO campaign starts and ends with research. An SEO must constantly research such things as keywords, rankings, and algorithms both pre-campaign and during an on-going campaign. At the outset of a campaign, this research may take days (if not weeks), and it is a never-ending process throughout the campaign.

Good developers / designers are in high demand at companies like mine, and they are constantly working on development and design projects. They are generally very task oriented, and often more interested in delivering a project on time and as fast as possible. The large amount of work and the restrictions on their time generally leave little room to conduct even the most basic and routine research that an experienced SEO would do.

This is not a knock on any designer or developer, because most designers and developers are 100 times smarter than I could ever hope to be. This is an issue that goes back to time, which they simply don’t have.

Ask yourself this question. If your average designer / developer spends 95% of his time doing their job (which is design and development work), how do they have any time to keep up with SEO best practices to improve their optimization skills?

2. They Don’t Get It.

Although many designers / developers will tell you they know SEO, most don’t. Ask them to explain some SEO tactics and you’re likely to get some jargon about Meta keywords and alt tags.

The fact of the matter is many of these guys simply don’t understand what it takes to run a good SEO campaign or to build a well-optimized site. A true SEO not only understands a campaign’s keywords, but can outline the company’s overall biz / marketing strategy and how it relates holistically to all of their online efforts.

Here are some common things that I’ve seen designers / developers do to display their SEO skills (or lack thereof):

Didn’t know how or where to place Meta Tags.
Left the site’s homepage title as either “Home” or “Untitled”.
Kept all the site’s titles and Meta tags the same.
Stuffed 100 keywords in the Meta keywords section.
Hid content by making the text the same color as the background.
Listed out a companies Top 50 service areas and keywords in the footer.
Use an image of text instead of real HTML text.
Many many many sites created with absolutely no scanable HTML text.

Trust me, I’ve seen a lot more than this, but you get the idea…

The SEO Poll

To further illustrate my point, I decided to float a 10 question poll to the development / design team at my office. I think you will find the results startling. Here are the questions, along with some of their responses:

1. How well do you know SEO?

“I honestly know next to nothing about SEO.”
“Until I was hired, I didn’t even know what SEO was.”

2. How much time do you dedicate to learning SEO best practices?

“Very little.”
“Some.”

3. How much time do you dedicate to implementing SEO?

“Now, I always keep SEO in mind when I begin designing a site. (Not that I know a lot, but I know that it matters).”
“None.”

4. How well do you understand keyword research & strategy?

“Not very well.”
“Want to know more.”

5. How well do you understand marketing strategies & their relation to SEO?

“I understand Marketing strategy very well, but not in relation to SEO.”
“Well, but eager to learn more.”

6. How good are you at content writing for SEO?

“Never done it. Don’t know how.”
“Tough question. Not sure if I can prove it, but probably pretty good.”

7. How good are you at content analysis for SEO?

“I have better than fundamental knowledge, but eager to learn more.”
“Have never done any SEO content writing.”

8. How good are you at analyzing traffic data in relation to SEO?

“Fair, but I would prefer someone else do it as it is not a part of my day-to-day job.”
“I think I could handle it, but I don’t do it everyday.”

9. How good are you at analyzing search engine rankings in relation to SEO?

“I understand and can discuss the reports.”
“I don’t really understand how a site gets ranked, but I’m sure I could figure it out.”

10. How well do you understand off-site SEO factors?

“I’m not even sure what this means.”
“If you mean things like linking and reciprocals, I have a little bit of knowledge.”

After reading some of these responses, are these really the people you want running your SEO campaign. If so, good luck! If not, hire a professional SEO.

Tags: Search Engine Optimization

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Chung Bey Luen

Great post. I think developers/designers should work together with people who know SEO so that they can design the website with SEO in place - on page optimization.