Difference between good web developers and good SEO’s
Recently I was given a new job opportunity to work within the SEO industry, this is a great experience and will definitely help progress my knowledge of the web and web practices. Coming from a web developer job / background I have noticed a lot of differences between the two jobs.
SEO is more reliant on the content of the website, for example you have to take into account several things, keywords, meta tags, keyword density. You also need to be able to know how the search engines views the page, both the HTML source code and the CSS must be validated. This can be done using the many validator’s available on the web (e.g. w3c). You also have to take into consideration the duplicate content on the site itself, Robots.txt and the sitemap. SEO requires a lot of research into backlinks (other sites linking to yours). Search engines also don’t like flash / javascript navigation, where as when I was a web developer this wouldn’t have even crossed my mind.
As a web developer you pick up many bad habits, one of which is cross browser compatibility which is a huge deal in the SEO world, as a web developers we were mainly bothered about it working in the clients browser rather than it working in all browsers. Also as a web developer, when creating a website, we were more interested in the functionality and the overall look and feel of the website rather than how the search engine views the page, for example I always put “index.php” in my links and since starting here I have found that to be a bad practice.
In the SEO industry the URL of every page on your site is important in order for the page to even be seen by a search engine, for example I used to make links like “index.php?var1=hello&var2=goodbye” this is a bad practice, and really should be changed to something like “www.mysite.com/hello/goodbye/” this is a much user friendlier URL and is more likely to be picked up by the search engines. If all your products or services pages have URL’s like this, its more likely to find these individual products/services from the search engine results page (SERP’s).
During my first week at Position Gold I have already progressed my knowledge and am happy that I will continue to do so. I look forward to working more in the SEO industry and bettering my knowledge of the business as this will definitely be a help when creating websites.
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