The Compulsive Coder

A recent conversation with a colleague brought up the subject of search engine optimization and marketing (SEO), web development, and managing client expectations. The basic issue is that most clients do not have an understanding of the fact that SEO is a specialized practice and industry separate from but related to web development.

Many clients expect that SEO is “just part of the package” when having a website constructed, and it is to a very limited extent. It is the responsibility of the developer to ensure that the URLs are “SEO-friendly,” that there are HTML and XML site maps, that the site is as close to W3C compliance as is reasonably possible, to avoid gratuitous use of Flash (or better yet, just avoid Flash altogether), and to ensure that Javascript and CSS degrade gracefully, etc.

But these are just the technical issues related to SEO and they primarily relate to making the site condusive to spidering by the search engines. The host of other activities related to SEO (research, keyphrase optimizing, back-linking, magneting, pay-per-click, etc.) fall far outside the developer’s scope of work. There is a thriving industry that revolves around SEO, just as there is a thriving industry that revolves around web development. There are conferences (Search Engine Strategies is the big one, taking place in San Jose right now), websites (Aaron Wall’s SEOBook.com and SearchEngineWatch.com are my favorites), mountains of books (Aaron Wall’s SEO Book and IBM’s Search Engine Marketing, Inc never leave my desk), and scads of white papers (I read everything produced by MarketLive and Avenue A | Razorfish).

Developers need to communicate this delineation between web developer and search marketer as soon as possible in the relationship; I’ve begun telling clients up front that I will deliver them a search friendly site, but that full SEO is another consultation altogether.

Here’s the analogy that I use with clients: engaging my development firm to build your website is similar to hiring a general contractor to construct a brick and mortar retail facility. One would probably not hold a general contractor responsible for the generation of foot traffic through the front doors of the store (although one would expect the doors to work smoothly, be marked with the appropriate signage, and be clean and professionally installed). In the same sense, unless the service has been explicitly agreed upon, one cannot expect a development firm to be responsible for the marketing activities that result in increased site traffic (although one would expect that the site work smoothly, employ established usability conventions, and be visually sharp and professional in appearance and operation).