Description :
When business owners set out to create a new website, they usually have their own vision of what the site will look like and its purpose, but not the different parts and pieces required to make it happen and do well in search.
To create a successful website, great graphics, content, programming and knowledge of search engine optimization must unite. What the business owner doesn’t realize is most IT people specialize in one of these areas and don’t know much about the others.
The Disconnect
You can have a website with the most spectacular images, but if your home page is done all in Flash, the search engines won’t be able to read it. Your programmer is all about function and probably not very good at design. He’ll give you 50 sort options for your products, but doesn’t realize he’s creating thousands of pages with duplicate content. SEO people understand some of what the other guys do and can explain to them how to do what they do to better optimize the website, but neither the programmer nor the graphic designer is too happy about it. The programmer doesn’t understand what difference it makes and the graphic designer thinks your suggestions will ruin the design. The SEO guy cares most about the content, the keywords, internal linking, code, crawl errors, etc. None of these issues are obvious to anyone else because they are not obvious when looking at a webpage. Each person in each specialty contributes an important part of the website, but all these aspects must co-mingle.
Executing a Good Website from the Onset
If you hire someone who is only familiar with one area, you can’t expect all the elements were taken into consideration. Often, the SEO person enters the scene later and there is more work to fix the issues with the website than if they had been addressed during the developmental stages. Often, the biggest hindrance is money. You’re better off with a simple site design that is well executed than a fancy one with all kinds of problems.
If a company can offer you all these services together, you’ll have a website that’s set to go when it launches, but maintenance with the same amount of integrity is important. If the company that creates your website only specializes in certain areas, you can hire someone to create optimized, quality content and provide that to your web designer, but you still have other web issues to be concerned with.
The only way to know what you’re getting is to ask. It will cost you more to go back and fix than to do things the right way initially.
*by andreascy*
