Creating a Search Optimized Integrated Wed Site

According to Sharri Thurow in her excellent book entitled "Search Engine Visibility" she states that: "Very few web developers and search engine optimizers have education, training, or experience in user-centered design. Likewise, very few usability professionals have a background in search engine optimization. As a result, both groups feel that search engine optimization and web usability are at odds."

And she goes on to say: "Very few web site owners, developers, and even usability professionals focus on building a strong search friendly foundation. Regrettably, many professional search engine marketing firms focus more on tricks and gimmicks than building a strong foundation."

This is a classic problem that results from the lack of approaching web design, content, architecture, navigation, objectives and marketing from an integrated perspective.

I have been involved with dozens of web projects with large and small companies, and the primary hurdle to creating a top shelf, search engine optimized, high converting, user friendly site lots of traffic and inbound links is almost always the same. Either too many people are involved with divergent opinions, agendas and reporting structures, or all the wrong people are involved who do not have the experience, education or skill sets required to make the entire process work.

In the case of too many people, think about all the possible titles and skills required to design, build, maintain and analyze a top tier site:
Site Owner
Information Architect
Creative Director
Designer
Navigation Expert
Developer/Programmer
Search Engine Optimizer
Content Manager
Content Providers
Copy Writers
Usability Professionals
Analytics Experts
Animators
Multi-media Content Creators
Bloggers
Social media Experts
PR Professionals
Pay Per Click Experts
eCommerce Expert
Landing Page Experts
Database Experts
Legal
Link Manager
Link Bait Expert
IT/Hosting Department
Affiliate Marketing
Viral Marketing Expert
Brand Manager
Marketing Manager
Advertising Manager
Sales Manager
Email Expert

Naturally, the smaller the company or the budget the more consolidation of these roles and skill sets will be required. A typical small business site may have from one to three people involved in the design, programming, architecture, content creation, analytics and optimization, if they even address all these basic considerations. Which explains why the average site (actually about 94% of all web sites), perform very poorly in organic search results for their topics, and have low ROIs and low gross revenue.

It takes more expertise, education, skills and time commitment these days to compete in the highly competitive and very crowded world wide web, which I have read that Google recently crawled its one-billionth web site. I have also read from another web indexer who has indexed nearly 109 million sites. Either way, it's a lot of sites.

So now more than ever, a serious web development team needs to be lead by an integrated marketing professional who can organize and pull all the assets and skills together, and who also possesses a serious education in web design, analytics, user persona's, usability research, search optimization, conversion, and web marketing. And I can guarantee you its not the IT Department or your Web Designer.

These days a it takes a much broader understanding of all the variables and all the moving parts of an effective web site and eCommerce to integrate the various objectives and skill sets.