It is a constant issue my free-lance sphere in Paris. I get approached by potential clients wondering why their

(Un)Fortunately, I think there will be a site overhaul in the near future. You have raised excellent points to consider and as an SEO professional, I agree with all of them. However, do you have any more insight as far as bringing all of the departments together to work as a team on a project like this? For example, our marketing folks are vicious about branding – how can they be convinced to work with IT hand-in-hand to focus on keywords that will generate the best SEM campaign rather than putting our company name on a page 30 times? It also seems that everyone has their hand in a piece of the site – at least three senior VPs down to roughly 60 property managers… what would you recommend in terms of bringing all of these people on board?

I have recently been employed by a company who are already in the final stages of a site redesign. My skills revolve around PPC but I do have a little knowledge of SEO and am very aware of how important it is to incorporate SEO within a site redesign. Within the next couple of weeks one of the web designers is coming into our office to answer any questions we have about the progress of the resdesign. This is my chance to find out exactly how much SEO effort they have put in when working on the design. I obviously have a stack of questions I want to ask but feel my lack of specialism in SEO may mean I miss something vital.

Although I have noted all the info throughout this thread, could anybody out there possibly post, say, the ‘top 10′ SEO questions I should ask our web developer when he visits. Bullet points would be great but feel free to go into as much detail as poss. Any info would be much appreciated and I promise I will post any feedback from the meeting on here. It’ll definitely be interesting to hear if the web developers have been wearing their SEO hats. My fear is that they have not!

I have definitely been in that position before while I did work for Adobe. One day they decided to change all of their URL’s from a keyword rich proper url to something completely different (e.g. store1 instead of adobe), just destroyed their rankings.

Enterprise clients and AM’s really need to have an open line of communication about such things and perhaps it can start with some in house training to make sure clients understand what can and does affect seo.

My external SEO consultant is providing me with a report to fix the HOLE, we are in….God I am So Angry…!!!!

Many business owners do not realize this at all… they just lose all of the ranking-juice if they don’t take the proper precautions.

Excellent Blog – I really appreciate your blog about Site Re-Design? Call Your SEO Expert First!, I have bookmarked it for later viewing and forwarded it on.

Cheers.

I’m not saying everyone should take this stance, but if you are a SEO firm or a design agency or a marketing company you should be asking about other players in the game when it comes time for a redesign.

“SEO is a marketing function for sure, but it needs to be baked into a product, not slapped on like icing after the cake is baked.”

Duane Forrester

Clients are more aware of SEO nowadays but still not too sure when SEO implementation should start. Before or after a new webite is launched…
Education is a key.

The bottom line, really, is that web development is about the client bringing the project to the developer, explaining what issues must be addressed, and leaving it up to the developer to create the most efficient and functional solution fo that project. If the client doesn’t bring up SEO, then what? If the client doesn’t seek out a web developer who makes use of seo-friendly practices, then what?

I just have to wonder what kind of set ups these people have where they would think that one element of the website shouldn’t correspond with the other element of the website.