Comments on: Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists

By: Roger

Roger — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 02:52:07 +0000

@Trevor-
By “important to be a well rounded coder” are you implying SEO skills are to be expected of a professional web developer?

Perhaps it’s reasonable to expect a good web developer to have an understanding of the value of tags and a basic SEO checklist. But isn’t that where the non-programming expectations should stop?

Web developers today have their lives full keeping up with (using your list here): CSS, HTML, jQuery, WordPress & ExpressionEngine to name just a few.

Honest search engine optimization consultants are experts in this evolving field, committing themselves to long hours online, and in print, researching, testing and tuning – many times long after the initial launch, when the web developer has moved on to other projects.

Trevor, you’re much more benign than many web developers I’ve read on this topic. Many are just down out rude about it with no obvious provocation – such as the piece Derek wrote last week.

My point is, web developers should be expected to solve problems and produce results within their particular skill set. But, knowing the ins & outs of the evolving search algorithms, and learning from trial and error is something a web developer has neither the time – nor the responsibility – to learn. At least not to the extent an honest SEO expert does.

Just my .02,
Roger

By: Trevor

Trevor — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 19:04:00 +0000

@Chris- Yep, that’s probably a good theory. I guess that’s why it is so important to be a well rounded coder.

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 18:58:32 +0000

Heh, yeah. I think that a lot of seo people are marketers turned techies. So they see an opportunity that the developers tend to ignore. From what I see, many developers tend to focus on the core functionality of the site and get lazy about some of the small specific stuff because not implementing an alt tag won’t prevent your jQuery validation from working.

So the seo guys come in and make up for our slack and charge people for it when it should have been done by the programmer in the first place.

By: Trevor

Trevor — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 18:32:14 +0000

@Chris- Yep, the black hat stuff really. Although I think paying someone to do stuff like write meta tags is almost like stealing.

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 18:30:34 +0000

I guess it depends on what you mean by SEO work. I regularly read SEOmoz and seoboy.com. I think their advice is very sound and sometimes not-so-obvious. They don’t advocate the “blackhat” stuff like hidden keywords and links.

If it’s the blackhat stuff that you find absurd, I would agree too!

By: Trevor

Trevor — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 18:25:42 +0000

@Chris- Absolutely I agree that not everyone has that knowledge, and if they don't, that is fine to go out and hire someone to educate you. But beyond that, SEO work is a little absurd to me.

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 18:21:37 +0000

I think some things aren’t blatantly obvious. Well, it all depends on your skill level/experience/knowledge. Sure, an experienced web developer will already know the seo principles. But starting off, all the developer blogs I’ve read never advocated using alt tags and other seo things. So I had to turn to the SEO guys to learn that stuff.