It seems that there is not a week goes past when one of you doesn’t feel the need to post about what a crock of shit SEO is. I have to admire your tenacity in maintaining this point of view despite the growth and continued success of SEO.
I’ve noticed, over many of these posts, that the majority of you are in fact web developers. It’s quite apparent that you feel SEO’s are stepping on your toes. The charges levelled at us are most often that there is nothing we do that shouldn’t be included in the development of a site. Some of the more aware deniers have conceded that website marketing is necessary (I’m glad that this at least can be acknowledged), but that this isn’t optimisation, it’s marketing and should be sold as such.
So I wanted to tell you that I have never met an SEO who wouldn’t love to be able to get on with the job of marketing without having to deal with the tasks that should be completed during development. However before you start complaining that SEO is a none job, I wanted to encourage you to take a good long look at your own industry, because perhaps you need to clean up your own back yard, before you start complaining about ours.
It is almost impossible for any search engine marketer to get on with the job of marketing a site, until they have corrected all of the issues caused by bad development. It is common to see sites that are created in such a way that no amount of marketing is going to do any good. Sites developed only in flash, robots.txt files that completely prevent a site being crawled, and site architectures designed in such a way that you could be forgiven for thinking that accessing the right information was in fact some sort of IQ test.
If you would like for SEO to no longer be something you feel the need to complain about, I strongly recommend that you work on educating your fellow developers on how to create sites that are ready to be marketed, instead of complaining at us for fixing your mistakes and enabling your clients to make some money from the sites you develop.
Yours, in hope that I never see a badly developed site again.
Sarah
