Within web development there are two differing areas, SEO Programmers and Website designers. As part of my role as an SEO programmer I often end up working on websites where design is a priority over function. This is mainly down to the web designer, who spends their time ensuring the look of a website is as perfect as they can make it to drive conversions.
However many web designers do not value the role of the SEO programmer, as it is through our skill set we drive traffic to the design, and without this traffic there is no possibility of a conversion from the website’s traffic. Many web designers do not like to give us access to the core files which run the website, and as a result we have to email our work across, either as modified files provided via email or via a report. Unfortunately this may give the impression we are just here to make additional work which they perceive as “not required”. I would estimate that a large percentage of the projects which run smoothly from a programming perspective are the ones we have the required access for.
Unfortunately that leaves the final few – and the majority of these problems are down to web designers who see the site as their baby, developed from the blank workspace into the amazing website it is now. Unfortunately in most of these cases they are search engine unfriendly, unspiderable messes which are only pleasing to the eye.
Compounding this problem is the fact that they insist only they can make changes to the website, carefully vetting and modifying every single change the SEO tries to implement, and with anything they do not understand the principle behind, attempt to give reasons to the client why this list of changes is both unnecessary and a pointless waste of the client’s money to pay to them to implement. Unfortunately for the client this puts them in the ‘piggy in the middle’ situation. However all of our clients realise the following fact, we as SEOs would not attempt to implement any single change to a website if we did not believe it was not required and would help with the search engine positions.
Why would a designer do this? Is it simply because they feel they know exactly what the search engines want, and believing it is exactly the same as their target audience wants; a pleasing to the eye website? This is quite simply not the case. A search engine wants a lot of descriptive content, giving details of what the website is about in human readable terms, plenty of quality links and many more factors.
At Just Search we are specialists in search engine optimisation, which is a process to get your website listed in a prominent position on the search engines, and this in turn drives the traffic to your website.
So whilst your web developer is protecting his code base, which may or may not be the best piece of coding in the world, and vetting and modifying the work we do for you, as our client; what they are in fact doing is restricting the work we can do to help your website reach the top of the SERPs.
Nathan
SEO Programmer
