It’s hard to believe the number of businesses who pay plenty of money to get a website constructed and then sit back and expect the new business, sales leads, and sales to start rolling in automatically – and are then shocked and taken aback when they don’t. Frequently they will go back to the web design company and hold them responsible over the problem.

But, while the business owner is berating the unfortunate web designer they have forgotten one crucial point…

The website designer is just that. A website designer. And he has completed what he was asked to do and created a great looking website for the customer. Chances are that what he is NOT is an SEO expert! But that probably doesn’t matter as it is almost guaranteed that it never crossed the business owners mind to check if SEO was included, or if it was included if it covered simply on-page SEO, or off-page SEO as well.

Sometimes the problem is ‘unconscious incompetence’ on the part of the business owner. That’s not meant to be derogatory. It is merely a technical term for when you simply can’t ask pertinent questions about something, not because you can’t think of a decent question, but because you don’t even know that thing exists or never had any experience of it. In other words, you can’t ask questions about search engine optimization if you’ve never even heard of it!

But is a website designer really the right person to be carrying out your search engine optimization for you? Okay, it is really handy if on-page SEO is taken into account and performed as the site is being constructed, but using someone who simply dabbles in SEO, or THINKS they know SEO is not a good plan!

Why not?

Well, the search engines are continually changing the algorithms that they use to determine who gets ranked where. Keeping abreast with these changes and what works and doesn’t work NOW all takes a substantial amount of time. It’s no good knowing the things worked a year or two ago, since they may not work now, and in fact using these ‘old’ ‘tricks’ can actually do more bad than good.

Keyword stuffing, tiny text, and hidden (or almost hidden) text are just some of the examples of SEO tricks that used to work and could often get you high placement, but today would in all probability end up in getting your page or website excluded or seriously penalised.

For a web site to rank well in the search engines you HAVE to have on-page search engine optimization, and regular off-page search engine optimization work performed on the website. There are just far too many competitors out there for your web site to rank well otherwise. And keep in mind that even if you aren’t taking SEO seriously you can be in no doubt that your business rivals are! Google doesn’t play favourites. Your competitors rank higher than you because they have paid an SEO expert to make sure that all the things are in place that Google wishes to see in a top ranking and highly relevant web page.

Your web business is far too important to ignore SEO, or worse, to leave it to a well meaning web designer. You NEED to do search engine optimization PROPERLY, and for that you need an SEO professional.