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Web Developers and SEO: Contentiousness and Common Goals

by Kristina Halvorson on October 28th, 2009

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A few weeks ago, there was a rather heated debate (some might call it a "smackdown") between a few industry luminaries and their supporting communities. On one side, the web development/user experience community. On the other, the SEO community.

This battle has been fought more than once before. Is it possible for well-built, awesome websites and products to be findable simply by being built "right"? Are web developers behind the curve when it comes to the latest, most effective SEO techniques? Is either practice absolutely necessary for online success? Are they both?

There were some great discussion points that arose in this most recent debate. Let’s review.

"Good SEO techniques are just good web development techniques."
First, there appeared an inspired rant by the inimitable Derek Powazek on the evils of the search engine optimization (SEO) consulting industry. Derek’s ire was fueled largely by his recent experiences working with publishing organizations that are sinking millions of dollars into SEO initiatives while laying off writers left and right. His argument:

Good SEO techniques are just good web development techniques. They should be obvious to anyone who makes websites for a living. If they’re not obvious to you, and you make websites, you need to get informed. If you’re a client, make sure you hire an informed web developer.
 

Derek received a lot of feedback on his post and responded with a post called SEO FAQ, which is also an interesting read.

"SEO is a legitimate form of marketing."
The post was pretty heated, and it spread (accordingly) like wildfire. It wasn’t long before the post reached Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief of SearchEngineLand.com and one of the SEO community’s most revered leaders. Danny posted a response to Derek’s first post, and then again to Derek’s "SEO FAQ" post. In Danny’s second post, he said:

 

Web development is not SEO. Good web developers will understand the fundamentals of SEO, in terms of good site architecture, crawlability and so on. But… few of them are dialed into how to handle giving Google and others a shopping feed. Or a feed of real estate listings. Or the completely separate ranking aspects that impact YouTube (the world’s second most popular search engine). Are they putting out a full-feed that Google Blog Search prefers? Are they checking that the URL shortener you use on Twitter spits back a 301 rather than a 302 redirect, or worse, frames stuff up via a 200 code?

 

Who has the secret sauce?
So. Whose advice is key for businesses truly succeeding online?

Fundamentally, Derek believes that the best way to drive traffic to your website or product is this: "Make something great. Tell people about it. Do it again." His position is difficult to argue with. But, it’s also based on several faulty assumptions, not the least of which is that everyone who "makes something great" has the right people’s attention, online and off. And, frankly, most of us who want to promote our products or services really don’t.

From Danny’s point of view, helping individuals and organizations raise the visibility of their websites is instrumental to online success. Important, yes. Instrumental? Not so sure. What’s prioritized by SEO professionals is getting as many eyeballs as possible on the page. And yet, if what you’ve made isn’t great, you’re going to lose attention and possible conversions, fast.

Ultimately, Danny and Derek talked. Common ground (of sorts) was reached. Derek posted a very classy, very informed apology to "the people out there doing good work for real clients under the auspices of SEO." Danny published Thoughts on Web Developers, SEO, and Reputation Problems. The storm quieted. And we all went back to our work.

Alignment: A girl can dare to dream
I’m a content strategist, which means I care deeply about the expertise and insights on both sides of the table. I want websites to be awesome. And I want the right audiences to find out about them, so those users can accomplish what they need to, and be happy.

Really, that’s what I want. For people to have happy online experiences.

You know, here’s how I see it. For the web development community to tell us that "if you build it and it’s awesome, they will come" is simply naïve, bordering on irresponsible. However, for SEO professionals to promote SEO as one of the primary tactics for online success is equally misleading.

There’s some fairly obvious common ground, here, that’s getting overlooked. And that’s creating and maintaining awesome content that’s optimized for the right people to find it at the right time in the right places.

In my experience, both the web development and SEO communities have largely marginalized the importance of delivering relevant, quality content that’s focused on meeting clear business objectives and user needs. Or, they’ll pay passionate lip service to it, then go back to preaching and promoting their areas of expertise.

And so the content, as it often is, becomes someone else’s problem. Which ultimately becomes the end user’s problem. Which then results in a really crappy ROI for all those web design/development/SEO dollars you just spent.

One of the key components of any business’s online success is to start by deeply considering the content itself. Before you worry about building the damn thing, let alone promoting it, figure out why you’re publishing content, who it’s for, what it’s going to say, how it’s going to sound, and what happens to it once it’s "out there."

In other words …  figure out your content strategy. Or, if you’re a web developer/designer or SEO wonk, ask for it. Because it should be informing what you are (or aren’t) doing.

Postscript: Get yourself edumacated
There were a lot of hopped-up, dueling posts and tweets that came out of both communities during the few days of battle. But there were a few added to the conversation in really valuable ways, and I encourage you to read them:

Additionally, I highly recommend the following resources to, well, pretty much anyone that deals with web content:

Onward, content comrades. Now, let’s hug it out.
 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at 1:00 pm and is filed under Content Strategy, Editorial Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • I agree with Nick. There's little point in getting irrelevant traffic and good SEO is about getting business not just traffic, so it's about understanding the client's customers and business their 'buying phrases' etc.

    Content without traffic and traffic without purpose are both clearly nuts.

    It's also true that there are too many 'snake oil salesmen' and poor developers.
  • Richard Warzecha
    Kristina,

    I enjoyed your well-crafted presentation of the recent debate. For someone looking on from the periphery, it gave me an insightful, unbiased view of both sides. (Have you ever considered a career in arbitration?) I also enjoyed your listing of a number of background resources in both disciplines which helps to frame the debate within a wider context.

    I agree that Derek's attempt to equate any good SEO technique with simply being good web development was off the mark. Danny and you correctly point out that this is naive and there is a whole range of legitimate SEO activities which would be very difficult to reasonably put under the web development umbrella. Enough said. That part of the debate should be over.

    I didn't as strongly agree with your dismissal of some of the points you attribute to Danny's position. Specifically, you leaned on the distinction between whether SEO is "instrumental" versus "important" to an organization's online success. Sorry, that distinction seems just a little too subtle to justify the need to find some sort of common ground. Additionally, you claim for "SEO professionals to promote SEO as one of the primary tactics for online success is equally misleading." Again, I don't agree that the claim that SEO is simply one, of potentially many primary tactics (some of which might involve content strategy) really is strong justification for the immediate need to find a common ground.

    Perhaps surprisingly, although I question the details of how you arrived at your conclusion, I do ultimately wholeheartedly agree that "creating and maintaining awesome content that’s optimized for the right people to find it at the right time in the right places" is very--and, yes, I'm comfortable saying this--instrumental to an organization's online success. I also support your dream that the fruits of a well-executed content strategy can lead to this. I will, though, give the usual warning: Be careful what you wish for, girl, it may come true!

    And when it does, content strategists can be the ones who will bring the sophistication to our methodologies which we so direly need. For instance, I've lately been on an--arguably Quixotic--quest to develop a framework, method, or just plain ol' set of steps to merging the input of usability testing around nomenclatures, card sorts and an SEO's search volume analysis in order to create a single taxonomy. Throw in marketing, design, and legal concerns and this could get quite messy. Though each camp often has its own approach and concerns, wouldn't it be great to have a systematic, scalable, and repeatable method of determining the best taxonomy given all these inputs? Who better than a content strategist to develop one?
  • Richard, I agree with much of what you say, with all due respect, your comment about good SEO technique simply not being a part of good design and development was too off the mark. Specifically you say "That part of the debate should be over" No, I think that debate has just begun. SEO should be 80% automated/technical n0t the other way around.
  • I think one very strong point that many people sometimes don't understand is that SEO is probably 15-20% technical. The rest you really need a marketing brain. Yes there are elements of a websites structure that need to be in place for SEO efforts to work properly but acquiring the expertise spread out the keyword phrases with a marketing approach is a very important component.
  • I agree completely with you that both the web developers and the SEO peeps don't place enough emphasis on good content. They'll talk about keyword density, good use of headings and all the rest, but not much about writing interesting stuff.

    However, I don't agree with Danny Sullivan's comment. A good developer does understand good semantic markup, the difference between a 301 and a 302, how to expose crawler friendly site maps, URL strategies and all the rest of the tricks things like Google/Bing/Yahoo! WebMaster Tools will teach you. These are all technical, and I'd expect my developers to do all of them.

    What the developers do NOT understand, however, is the off-site SEO work. Back link campaigns, page rank shaping, paid for search activity and other items that are nothing to do with the way the site is built but hugely affect your ranking. And you need to do this part right too. Everyone else is doing it - if you don't, you are just being naive.
  • Jeff Chasin
    First, great post.

    Second, there are some very large, complex sites out there that have wonderful, relevant, specific, useful content full of strategic awesome sauce. And you couldn't find that content with a GPS and a bloodhound. Then there are some highly optimized sites where everything gets a once over from an SEO before it goes live. But nobody wants to read it, or forward it to a friend, or tweet about it, etc.

    I think your alignment idea is on the money, especially with large-scale sites. There needs to be a serious content strategy, but writers and content strategists, and IA's and everyone else on the team needs that edumacation to make sure the on-page factors are covered and covered well. Then the SEO specialists can spend their time on the more complicated, and time consuming off-page work.
  • Any SEO will tell you that there is nothing more important than good content. It drives natural links and is the only thing that will ultimately convert into anything more than eyeballs on your site.

    But the big problem with Internet Marketing today lies on the customer side. There are several issues:
    1. The customer doesn't get it -- It is very difficult to outsource good content creation. If a business has hired you to write their tweets or post on their blog --- do you really understand their industry? Do you really know enough to create something valuable? This leaves us with requesting content from the customer on a consistent basis. They have to be educated as to why they should create an article rather than have another full page 4 color print ad made up and published -- it is easier for the customer to wrap their head around the value of the print ad.

    2. The customer has limited time or money- Creating good content takes time or money. You have to do it yourself or you have to pay someone to do it.

    If the content isn't coming in from the client and they don't have the money to pay you to do it --- you are left with very few options.

    You can turn down the deal or you can use SEO to get eyeballs to subpar content.
  • There will always be bandits, name sayers and techno babblists spreading snake oil. Where there is opportunity there are shysters. The simple truth is out there, how complicated we decide to make it is our choice. The fact becomes that search engine optimization is simple with great content and a decent CMS. The hype the spin the jargon is just that. Great content does the SEO for itself.
  • Jeff Chasin
    I totally agree that selling a position in the SERP's or "guaranteed to raise your ranking" type pitches are snake oil. I also agree that there are many shady characters out there positioning themselves as *experts*. But I have to respectfully disagree that SEO is simple with great content. Ever try to rank a real estate site? Ever try to improve the ambient findability of a GREAT page of content when it's locked in a legacy CMS with no budget for infrastructure development? Your content could be free money and nobody would find it. I think it's really important to make the distinction between shady so-called experts, and the absolutely necessary skills of a real SEO - especially in an enterprise environment. If you're running a personal blog, sure SEO is simple with great content, but if you're looking at a complex site with thousands or hundreds of thousands of pages, not so much.
  • Jeff, there are caveats of course, my high road was I said a "decent CMS." I also think that "free money" as a search term is a bad representation of a valid b2b (my other caveat) search string.

    You mention enterprise environment, which leads me back to legacy content and systems. We can't go backwards, bad legacy practices. i.e. lack of or inferior editorial reference, lack of processes and/or taxonomy exacerbates the current state. There are some things we can do to make it easier, but if the foundation isn't there we need to go back and fix that and build from there. The debate should not be about web development vs. SEO, or UX vs. content strategy or marketing vs.
    sales, it should be about identifying and remediating content gaps.

    How do you do that? One keyword string at a time.
  • rosymarshal
    I agree with you. You written really well as in todays scenario SEO and web developers are in the same situation you drawn here. I really liked the topic. Indeed an interesting one.
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