Once I had finished the first website that I actually set out onto the Internet, the question that I was asked by my friend who I had made this site for was “How do I get anyone to find the site now, how do I get into Google for xxxxxxxxx?”

Now at this time, I had never heard of SEO, I was a young budding web designer and I didn’t have a clue what the answer was. I was aware of Pay Per Click advertising, but this website was for an underground music production studio with limited resources, and they were never going to have any kind of budget to undertake this kind of activity.

At this stage I was still learning how to do this kind of thing, so I approached some web designers that I knew and asked them how they approached this. Despite being a great designer (whose name I will keep to myself), one of these guys’ responses was “Never promise your client traffic from search engines. You will have to tell them to hire a specialist for that”.

Now that I am one of these specialists, I frequently come across web designers who do not really “get” the SEO process.

The basic on-page factors of SEO are mainly simple, utilising areas in the head of a webpage appropriately, writing compelling content for the site, and utilising all the tags on a page appropriately as required.

The trickier parts of SEO are actually identifying the correct words to target to gain traffic to the site, and the majority of the “off-site optimisation”, and that is where the need for Search Engine Optimisation and Marketing professionals are needed.

I always try and explain to the web designers why we want to do the things we do, and have some guidelines that I “wish” all my sites were constructed using. But sometimes, perhaps because it may seem that I am telling them their construction method is wrong, web designers don’t seem to take these issues on-board and do the same things repeatedly, despite my best explanations as to why to do it the other way.

We work with the sites we are given to work on, and make the best of that situation. But after you have given someone information for improved results in future, I often find that this is not taken on board and we have to do the same work repeatedly.

Of course some web designers do take this on, and this makes life much easier in the long run! They aren’t in the majority yet, but I’m sure as SEO evolves in the future this will continue to change.