Designer or SEO?

There's just too many instances of this happening for me not to address it. Here it is once and for all: Web designers are not SEOs. Not at all. Not in any way.

Okay, to be fair, I am not a designer - no way, no how. I have no graphic creativity to speak of and my design coding skills are rudimentary at best. See, I have no trouble admitting this. So why does it seem like every other designer out there thinks he/she knows SEO just because they can make a pretty Web site?

I think I am walking dangerous ground here - I am not declaring war on designers. Rather, I just want to come to an agreement that we are different creatures with totally different skill sets.

Last week, I sat there and consoled (yes, that is the right word) consoled a guy who had just dropped $9,000.00 on a new site. 600 pages of FRAMES. I couldn't believe some designer did that to him. His site has virtually no chance of ranking well. Worse, the new site is displacing one with good rankings, both are live and no coherent re-launch strategy was put into place, so any rankings he did have are quickly going the way of the dinosaur.

Yesterday I did another consultation. A Law firm. They had an old site that ranked well for a couple of good keywords. The new site was launched and their rankings disappeared. GONE.

The firm partners crafted this e-mail to me - they had done their homework. There was a grand list of questions about the design of the new site and how it may have affected their rankings.

Questions like:

• The old site had lots of text on the main page, the new site doesn't have as much. Should we put more words on the front page?
• Does the design software make a difference - Frontpage vs. Dreamweaver?
• During the redesign, we put up a temporary site with the exact same content. Could this make a difference?
• We used to have links at the top and bottom of each page, should we go back to this?

The law firm got on the phone and emplored us to help. They thought they needed a redesign to get their rankings back.

I looked at the site and guess what? It looked great. The code was super clean; static html pages; wonderful use of CSS; javascript was all kept off page in external files; lots of great content; link structure looked sound; It was a well designed site, indeed.

So what was the problem?

The problem was that clearly, the designer THOUGHT they knew something about SEO. They may well have read SEO for Dummies or some other basic guide. But the re-launch killed them.

The re-launch process made about every major SEO mistake one could make.

• The new site was launched under a "ficticious domain" while under development
• There were no 301 redirects done for the existing urls
• Existing backlinks were ignored

Redirects killed the rankings star. Buggles eat your heart out.

Every single deep-link backlink now 404's out. There was a duplicate content issue with the new site and the old site - they were live simultaneously.

What's the point? The point is that this designer lost the rankings for this client. They did so because they did not have the SEO expertise to handle the site relaunch and migration. Although they have basic on-page SEO under control, this is a TINY part of what SEO is.

These are two examples of many, many examples I could provide. Since they both came up in the past week, it was worth an entry.

I'm not declaring war on designers, quite the opposite: I want them to work with us. Accept that they are not SEOs and let us do our thing. Engage us BEFORE launching a new site, so that catastrophic errors can be avoided.

Designers and SEOs are different creatures. Let's accept that and move forward!