The SEO Firm and Web Developer Need to Be on the Same Page

Written by Nick Stamoulis

First things first. SEO and web development are two separate things. To some that may seem obvious but if you are relatively new to online marketing it may be a bit confusing. Web development is more about the usability, look, and feel of the site whereas SEO is more about the content and making sure that the search engine spiders are able to properly crawl and index the site.

There are plenty of SEO firms that offer web development services and web development firms that offer SEO, but it’s our belief that you can only really specialize in one or the other. In many cases a company that isn’t large enough to have an SEO Specialist and a website developer/designer in house will outsource the two. Because SEO is so intrinsically tied to web development in many ways, it’s important to make the introduction between the two parties to ensure that each knows their role and won’t “step on the other’s toes”.

From experience, without this relationship between the SEO firm and the web designer/developer some crazy things can happen that ultimately can affect SEO success.

Here are some examples:

Two analytics codes are added to the site

Google Analytics is a must for every website in order to gauge the success of the website and evaluate how it is performing. SEO firms know this. Web developers know this. And each looks at Analytics (and Webmaster Tools) for different reasons. If the SEO firm and the web developer aren’t working together they might each add their own separate code to the site. This is totally unnecessary. Each should be granted access to the same account. Any code that is added to a site can really slow it down which affects page load time which ultimately affects SEO since the search engines pay attention to load time.

Web developer changes content

A web developer should not be changing content on the site unless they have permission to do so. This has happened before. We go through the keyword research process, make on site recommendations, and then implement those approved changes to every page of the site. Depending on the size of the site, this can take some time. Those content changes need to sit for awhile in order to gain any traction in the search engines for the targeted keywords. If the web developer goes in and changes the SEO work for whatever reason, it’s essentially like starting from scratch. In addition, too many content changes to existing pages might raise a red flag that you are trying to game the system.

Technical changes are made

SEO also has a technical component because you need to ensure that the search spiders are “seeing” the site properly. Any change that a web developer makes should be explained to the SEO firm so that they can weigh in from an SEO perspective. Sometimes even a so-called “minor” change can have an effect that the web developer wouldn’t have even thought about.

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