Role Of a SEO consultant

There are so many posts out there to discuss what a SEO consultant should do, but this post will talk about what a SEO consultant must not be doing. A common myth that revolves around the developers is that,” SEO is another form of QA, SEO is just a quality checking process”.  But it is not, what SEO is. One main reason for this myth is, India doesn’t have a great  talent pool for SEO and it is not off shored as extensively as other areas, the reason sound valid, SEO is more of marketing and trust building which is very much GEO specific, unless and until you have the feel of that market you cannot do wonders. Sitting from India, it is not that easy to know how things works in European Real estate market. It need a lot of homework, it doesn’t only stop with Site optimization, it stretches beyond.

Developer’s  point of view:
From a Developer’s point of view, it still remains as another quality process, they dont know where a SEO comes in the SDLC. SEO is something, which directly involves a stake holder and a SEO guy, it doesn’t have anything to do with other roles in the Project management. And a SEO process should start from the day one of development, if not done, it is double the work for development. Just make one thing clear, before starting the development, Create sites for users, Search Engines will be attracted; if not, your site can never rise up the ladder. Search Engines, are not GODS, they are just a third party agent, who fetches you what you want. Have that in mind and create the code, make it clean and clear, that is all we need to do, SE is not expecting art out of you. In a real development environment, the first phase of SEO should be done by the developer itself, On-Site SEO must be a responsibility of a Developer. If this is carried out well, then there is no special effort need in the SEO cycle for this. Dont expect a SEO guy to instruct you for this phase, it is mandatory that you should follow these rules while development.

If SEO doesnt start in parallel with development, then it is gona be a re-work. There are some key areas where the development should be clear.

1. SEO guy will not clean the code, it should be done by the development(this whole confusion arises because of the fact that SEO is not carried out along with the development) . SEO guy will identify the areas to be improved, but he cant sit and implement that.
2. Both dev and SEO team should work hands to identify how best the SEO can be implemented for a particular project. SEO guys might not be aware of the technical feasibilities of a particular implementation, it is dev team’s work to figure that out. Say for example, lets take a site that is developed with Drupal, technically speaking, there are so many SEO friendly modules that are available in SEO which makes implementation very easy, like path module, both SEO guy and the dev team should be aware of this, how far we can utilize the path module must be known to the dev team and how effectively it can be used must be known to SEO guy. This parallel working will yield great results

Plan your SEO process, plan how this can go hands on with development. If this is done, then SEO will really work out.