I’m always amazed by the amount of businesses of all sizes who pay big money to get a website built and then sit back and wait for the new business, sales leads, and profit from sales to come rolling in automatically – and are then stunned and amazed when they don’t. Often they will go back to the web design company and blame them over the problem.

However, while the business owner is berating the unfortunate web designer they have forgotten one key point…

The web site designer is just that. A web site designer. And he has done what he was asked to do and created a nice looking website for the business owner. It’s very probable that what the web designer is NOT is an SEO expert! But that probably doesn’t matter as it is almost guaranteed that it never crossed the business owners mind to inquire if SEO was included, or if it was included if it covered only on-page SEO, or off-page SEO as well.

Frequently the problem is ‘unconscious incompetence’ on the part of the business owner. That’s not meant to be derogatory. It is simply a technical term for when you simply can’t ask pertinent questions about something, not because you can’t think of a good question, but because you don’t even know that thing exists or never had any knowledge of it. In other words, you can’t ask questions about search engine optimization if you’ve never even heard of it!

However, is a website designer really the right person to be doing your search engine optimization for you? Of course, it is very useful if on-page SEO is taken into account and carried out as the site is being created, but getting someone who simply dabbles in SEO, or THINKS they know SEO is not a good plan!

Why?

Well, the search engines are continually altering the algorithms that they use to calculate who gets ranked where. Keeping abreast with these changes and what works and doesn’t work NOW all takes a substantial amount of time. It’s no good knowing the things produced good results a year or two ago, since they may not produce good results now, and in fact implementing these ‘old’ techniques can actually do more bad than good.

Keyword stuffing, tiny text, and hidden (or nearly hidden) text are just some of the examples of things that used to work and could often get you top placement, but today would almost certainly result in getting your page or website excluded or heavily penalised.

For a web site to rank highly in the search engines you NEED to have on-page SEO, and recurring off-page SEO work performed on the site. There are simply far too many competing sites out there for your site to rank well otherwise. And bear in mind that even if you aren’t taking SEO seriously you can be sure that your business rivals are! Google doesn’t play favourites. Your competitors rank higher than you because they have paid an SEO expert to make sure that all the factors are in place that Google needs to see in a top ranking and highly relevant web page.

Your web business is far too important to ignore SEO, or worse, to leave it to a well meaning web designer. You HAVE to do search engine optimization PROPERLY, and for that you need an SEO professional.