The huge switch towards SEO is somewhat unsettling to some Web Designers and Developers. It is a business in itself that is full of uncertainty and false information, leading many businesses down the wrong path towards building a successful website.

For those that don’t know what SEO is, Search Engine Optimisation is the art and science of altering the physical and theoretical structure of a websites’ content and layout to make it more suitable for search engine spiders (scripts that copy and examine web pages for relevancy ) to search through their content. Simply put, they fix websites to make them more attractive to search engines like Google. If you want to learn more about Search Engine Optimisation and how it should be implemented into your website take a look at the SEO category of Search-This.com.

When you hire someone to perform SEO on your website you are hiring someone to review your front-end. In many ways hiring someone purely for SEO benefits can produce more harm than good because you’re introducing another designer/developer to criticise your own. Whilst this has never been a problem for me I’ve heard that things can get pretty heated when a clash of knowledge occurs, mainly around best practices in Web Design.

Search Engine Optimisation is a business that should not really be a business. This is because the entire purpose of SEO is to fix what is wrong with your design and content. In essence, what a SEO consultant does is analyse your page and tell you how to make it better. The obvious problem with this is that the previous design was not up to your standards, making the designer look out-of-touch at his/her own job. SEO work on a website built years ago out of Frontpage and Tables cobbled together is horrible, because there is little that can be done other than to have a complete site overhaul. If you’re not happy after you’ve had SEO work done then you can either blame the SEO consultant you hired or blame your design.

Many SEO consultants are primarily designers or developers, and their new line of work ensures that they focus on a certain area of their previous experience. When a SEO consultant is dealing with a poor design or poor coding that designer/developer leaps right out of them, needing to be locked back in its cage before its head explodes. As a web professional it’s painful to see companies make mistakes, and when someone shows you a website they made in Microsoft Word and asks why it’s not the number one ranked website under the term ‘business’ you can feel angry at whoever or whatever led them down this road.

One area a designer or developer isn’t at his/her best is when content is involved. A SEO consultant cannot tell you what to write and neither should they, because it’s not their content. However, content is what Google searches and the advice companies should be looking for is how their content should sound. Nine times out of ten a reputable SEO consultant will point out that as long as a human can read it perfectly well it is written just fine. Of course, content can always be edited to include more keywords, but this leads me onto my next point.

At the end of the day, what is SEO? It’s best practices in design and development, coupled with usability and accessibility. These ‘best practices’ were never created for Search Engines, they were written only for users. This is where your focus should always be! Seek out the best practices on the Internet and through the W3C and ensure that your designers and developers are creating websites to the strongest standards.

I could compare it to a noble trade like Building, but it would be false for me to do so. Why? Simply because Building relies on the domain of the real-world, whilst we’re creating within a virtual domain with dynamic boundaries. Still, with either, industry best practices should always be the main rule to go by.

Search Engine Optimisation has done one thing for the Internet that is positive. It’s turned the term “usable, accessible, standards-compliant website” into a three letter abbreviation for “making money on the Internet”. It’s the only language a business understands and SEO has shown the masses that standards-based design and development is important. Web Designers and Developers need to take note that this is the time to earn your trade, because the standards movement has finally taken off, and it’s fixing many websites out there.