Your new website and search engines

Quite sure what we can say from an SEO perspective to web designers and programmers will look really obvious nowadays but at the 20Mb ADSL era, while you surf the net and observe with your SEO eyes the sites you visit, especially corporative ones and e-commerces, the evidence reveals its absence in quite a high percentage. Something fails.

Who makes the site and who cares about SEO

The different types of professionals involved in website building focus in their tasks and duties: project manager organises and creates the bridge towards the client, information architects organise the structure to allocate the content, usability experts will make sure visitors experience is going to be like heaven, designer work on the web design, html coders cut the design into html and css, programmers draw functionalities, write the code and the system administrators configure the environment and host the site.

More times than desired the roles mix up or merge in less people than the ones listed before. It is really strange if there is someone paying real attention to how good the web has been built in terms of search engine optimization regarding what it means (lot more than the evident) besides PageRank obsession or good rankings in search results pages at Google.

When the new site is going live it is not it, it is exactly the starting point for the user who has to carry on with the hard tasks to:

• find the site in the vast internet (findability is the first filter)
• explore the web once arrived (usability is the second one)
• understand what is all about in seconds (IA + communicability, the thirds)
• convert and be engaged (if service or product is what the visitor is looking for)

If there is nobody with a solid SEO knowledge in the team, who is going to care about such a fundamental web discipline? The project manager roll is extremely important because it has the commitment towards the client to evangelise in good practises, resolving any doubt, making them forget the myriads of stupid myths around how the web should be and advising conveniently about how things are going out there in the digital world.

As key part in the development process, project manager should actively care about any SEO related aspect and make sure the rest are going to do their part, too. In general, that issue floats around in the air and the others working in the web project do their best, sometimes quite a few, or just don't happily care at all. Funniest consequences for the client sooner or later.

Some providers sell web sites very limited by their (poor) knowledge, no matter if the provider is a big company or a freelance, so what they offer is not enough to cover the client's needs. Just having a web online it is not 'the one and only' thing to achieve and if they do not understand this simple principle means a big deficiency of medium understanding what, by the way, damages the public image of the web services providers community.

Ok, ok, we can understand, everybody have invoices to pay but making an effort to improve the services offered will make the difference between a good service provider and the one you will always remember as one more attempt to have a good converting web but became a waste in time and money.

Dear 'I urgently need a new web site' clients

Ask your close to be providers what they know about SEO and how they are going to manage this along the project. If they whistle looking to the infinite take your money and run as far away as you can. If their responses do not sound convincing to you again run away and of course never trust those who promise cheap miracles in short time.

If your web has been finished and went live, ask a consultant how good it is in SEO terms and ask your provider to fix it not paying more money, this will be a well inverted money with long term benefits. Otherwise you will save this consultancy money but the cost of the web could be useless.

Consultant must be professionals, SEO is not magic and everything can be explained from a very logical point of view so he or she should be able to give all kind of reasonable explanations. If not run away again. There are a lot of snake charmers in this world also.

Dear 'I want your money anyhow' providers

Keep updated not only in the disciplines you have some knowledge about but in the ones you do not know a single word of. Re-think how you do it and if this is really enough to satisfy client's needs or just to cover yours.