Lots of very good web designers don’t get SEO.
They think it’s a “snake oil” sales technique designed to trick Google into placing bad sites artificially high.
Sorry to break it to you guys, but that’s just crazy talk.
A lot of SEO work is correcting mistakes made by web designers
There are good SEO consultants and dodgy people who try to game Google .. but the market for SEO has been created by web designers who produce websites which cost more than they make for the website owners.
Being on both sides of the website fence (as both a project manager and a quasi-designer/developer) in my 9-to-5 job, I see both arguments here. Personally, I fall more on the side of the “a well-done website shouldn’t need additional SEO” argument.
It’s really pretty straightforward. If you build a website that has proper markup and solid content, including valid keywords that you know are relevant to your content and will be searched for by your target audience, you shouldn’t need dedicated “SEO” consultants. Most of the SEO advice I’ve heard from agencies I’ve worked with is really just ways to fix what was poorly done in the first place. Had the site(s) been built well to begin with, we could have saved our money for something other than being told things we already knew.
I like Derek’s comments on the topic from a few months ago, which got more than a little flak:
Look under the hood of any SEO plan and you’ll find advice like this: make sure to use keywords in the headline, use proper formatting, provide summaries of the content, include links to relevant information. All of this is a good idea, and none of it is a secret. It’s so obvious, anyone who pays for it is a fool.