What am I missing?

E

emmadesigns

New Member
I have been doing both front end design and development for over ten years and since starting going self employed i have noticed a lot of web designers offering SEO. As far as i go with SEO is writing code that validates and focus on good page layout. I don’t offer an SEO rate because i don’t specialise in it. I suppose my question is, is there anything specific (apart from the obvious) that i am missing? I read up on it and i do all it asks and i know site ratings is mostly based on traffic. But I am not sure what other web designers are charging extra for. Can you let me in on the secret? lol.
 
We do the same as you and make sure our code is meaningful and 'clean'. That's as far as we would go. SEO probably refers to off page stuff such as link building and directory submission.
 
Yeah, I'm in the same thought boat as many others in regards to SEO. A good website should already be optimised when coding and developing etc. If you've paid a developer then you shouldn't have to pay extra or anyone else to perform SEO tasks.

Like Corrosive's suggested, it must be off the page stuff such as link building etc that people pay for, or, a whole load of companies are making a quick buck off susceptible people.
 
SEO starts with building in the keywords that the client requires, in the right places and then links to the site. It should be a feature of the design, not bolted-on afterwards.
 
On-page SEO is all about knowing the keywords that a client wishes to focus a page or an entire site on, based on that you may set appropriate H1 tags, description and keywords. Then another important aspect is the internal linking of various pages of a particular site. I think that's one of the most important aspects of a well designed site. Once all this is done correctly, the efforts that a client has to take gets greatly reduced for the offline activities/off-page optimization.
 
I think to tackle both web design and SEO at the same time and by the same person is quite a task. I work as part of a team of 3 people who do SEO full time, working alongside web designers, and this means that we can work together throughout the whole project. This works very well, because we can all do our best in our individual fields. Of course, a web designer who is aware of SEO issues is a benefit, because at least you can build-in some SEO friendly features from the offset.
 
SEO is just no longer based on the inital meta tag keyword & descriptions.

It is as said already based on cleanliness of coding, traffic, H1 tags, alt tags, link building, directory submissions etc.

Directing traffic to you site and quality of content helps greatly with ranking.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top