There’s something that’s weighed heavily on my mind this week. This topic has always been looming in the background, but it has reared its ugly head one too many times for me. So what am I talking about?

Please excuse me for a moment while I don my helmet and bullet proof vest…

Web designers are not SEOs. Period.

There, I said it.

Before the virtual beating ensues, please allow me to explain. Designers and SEOs have totally different skill sets. Sure some overlap, but many do not.

To be fair about this, I am not a designer. I have the graphic creativity of a three year old. But SEO on the other hand, is what I eat and breathe. They are different skills.

Case #1: The Case of I Can’t Believe You’re Still Using Frames

I sat and listened to a client last week explain how he paid a designer almost ten grand to design his new site. He got a site alright – 600 pages of frames and no real chance of getting these pages ranked. The designer used a decade old technique and ignored appropriate re-launch protocol.

I really felt bad for the client – how could he have known?

Case #2: The Case of I Have the On-Page Part Down, So That Makes Me an Expert

We did a consultation just yesterday with a client who had a new site designed by a well-intentioned designer (not NetSol). The new site launched late in 2007 and today, rankings are gone. The client thought for sure that they needed a re-design to fix the new design (that’s a mouthful, eh?). They didn’t. On closer examination of the new site, I found it to be very well organized. In fact, many key SEO principles were used in the design: Clean html, proper tags, lots of content, good keyword distribution, javascript kept off page, extensive use of CSS, sound internal link structure. It is a well designed site – even from an SEO perspective.

But rankings are gone. Why? Because on-page criteria is just one component of many that make up SEO. This particular site was re-launched with zero regard for SEO and the site owner is paying the price – quite literally. All of the deep-link backlinks are hitting pages that are no longer found. The old site and the new site were live at the same time creating a duplicate content issue.

New server, new urls, temporary site, no link continuity, no redirect strategy. No SEO.

These are but two cases of an endless stream that we encounter all the time.

This is not a slight at designers at all. Rather, it is a request. Please, please, please engage a good SEO before or during your design work. That way, we can work together to make sure that the client gets what they need: An attractive new site that has high value and great content for end users, but also considers all the many facets of SEO that many web designers don’t know about (and why would they?).

Designers and SEOs are different. Let’s each leverage our specific brand of expertise to help our clients succeed.