Well, maybe not all of them, but a large number of web designers that I am aware of claim to offer SEO as a package bundled in with web design (and sometimes charged on top off the web design fee) but don't actually know what is required for SEO. In the most part, I consider that most web designers that offer SEO probably are actually constructing a search engine friendly website but NOT optimising it. I have been told of some people billing it as its expected and then not actually doing anything for that additional money.

I'm not really a web designer, despite the fact that there are many elements of web design that I am aware of and am capable of implementing. I can and have built websites, but I am primarily a search engine optimiser.

I would describe search engine friendly as a site that is easily crawled by the search engines above and beyond anything else. Most web designers that I know wouldn't research the types of phrases that are most commonly searched for in the industry of the site that is being made prior to construction, and the file structure is created from a perspective of sensible construction, rather than using phrases and terms here in an "optimised" fashion.

A search engine optimised website targets particular researched phrases to particular pages that contain relevant content. Search engine friendly site construction is an important aspect, but it's the targeting of particular phrases that sets apart optimisation from search engine friendly. These phrases would then be used appropriately in the file name, title, description, headings and of course, in the actual content!

I've come across many well constructed, nicely designed sites that have the same title and description on every page of the site, and a web designer has claimed that they have done SEO on the site because every page is indexed. I suspect that in the vast majority of these situations that most of the pages on a site like this will be languishing in the supplemental index - and unless someone searches for content that is truly unique to that site, then it's unlikely that any traffic will come to those pages.

I think that some web designers can do actions for a site that are actually counterproductive to the search engine friendliness and optimisation of a site. I was speaking to one web designer (who of course does offer SEO) who said that they also do off-page optimisation - they use an automated submission that submits them to thousands of directories at the same time. He said that his site had achieved its position for "web design [insert location]" by using this technique.

I felt like screaming - this is the antithesis of how Vertical Leap would handle an off-page optimisation strategy! A well managed off-page optimisation strategy is designed so that the anchor text that is used to link to the site is varied (although thematically similar), and the sources of these links are in a variety of different locations.

It may work for reasonably competitive phrases, the particular web designer in question does rank top 10 in Google UK for that particular phrase, but I couldn't see them ranked anywhere for similar phrases, so I suspect that this technique has probably been counterproductive for the long tail of their search.

To summarise, search engine friendly in my book merely means that a site has no impediments in its construction for a search engine to read the content that is contained on a website.

Search engine optimisation is targeted work on a site that is seeking rankings for particular phrases by ensuring all areas that can be modified for optimum performance are modified to give it the best chance of success.