In one designer’s chat room a girl asked a question. Does a designer need to know about SEO and how to help a client design a website properly? Initially the client wanted a website, but he was told that one-page sites are poorly promoted and it is better to make a multi-page site such as business cards with a blog. In short, he wanted a design with SEO in mind.
What should I do? Is it necessary to study something additionally or is it worth engaging specialists?
Or maybe right away at the first meeting to tell customers that you do not know anything about it and give contacts to SEO?
Further, the girl who asked these questions, came across some strange advice along the lines of: “No, you do not need to understand it, there are SEO professionals for that.
Then she was told that this is the task of marketers.
Others have even more confused the conversation, saying that this should do a copywriter.
There was also this phrase: “You definitely do not have to understand how to drive traffic to the site as a designer.
Next, someone wrote that she should become a project manager and outsource such tasks. And so they began to write about the conversion, and the basics of marketing, and how important marketing is when developing large services (although the question was not about them at all), and something about product research…
In general, they gave me a bunch of different versions and advice, which only made things more confusing. I am not surprised that after reading all of the “advice and reasoning on the subject”, the designer simply refused the order.
And in fact, the customer only wanted a design with SEO.

What is SEO

Conducting a technical audit of the site, identifying errors, make up terms of reference for developers and monitor performance. There are specialists who correct deficiencies (usually webmasters and SEO in one person).
They work with the reference mass. This reviews, forums, press releases and so on.
They do usability analysis. This includes the ability to analyze the top of the competitors’ sites. Then, taking into account the analysis, a plan is made to develop the client site.

This is just the third point – about usability and overlaps with the designer and SEO.

Algorithms are now sharpened on the analysis of behavioral factors. It all comes down to what sites should be as user-friendly.

The site is slow to load – catch a warning. Fonts are too small on mobile – catch a warning. High bounce rate? So there are problems with the structure, navigation or content – lower your site in prominence. And so on down the list…

Does the designer should know SEO

Of course, a designer who has an idea of all of the above, earns extra points in the eyes of the client, as can give advice and advice on key points. But to know and understand it he should not. Website promotion – a completely different service. And such work is carried out when the site is already loaded onto the hosting, but certainly not at the design stage.

Most sites do not have H1. Others have it, but comes after H2, and so on… It seems that the designers of basic optimization in general has not heard.

Proper title tags – a very important thing for indexing and ranking pages. I’m not going to dwell on it, because the subject is too long and it won’t fit into one article.

Texts

The designer should not be able to write texts for the banding and especially optimized for key queries, articles on the blog.
You should be able to distinguish good text from bad, if we are talking about a landing page or the text for the main page of a multi-page site. This is enough.
Will be a plus ability to edit sent texts. I, for example, often do this. I can paraphrase something, reduce something, something to write more, swap places. But it is not a question of writing a text from scratch with 1000+ characters.
Working with the text, the designer works on the structure of the page, the ease of perception of the information, the presentation of content. Visual plus text improves behavioral factors, which means it will affect the site’s ranking in search results. This is your area of responsibility for seo.

What are seo texts and seo copywriting

SEO-text is a text material that is designed according to the rules of search engine marketing: the keys are inserted, the structure is followed and the quality criteria for the content are fulfilled.

The semantic core is often made for large sites. News sites, thematic blogs, online stores and information portals. Semantics can be collected as before the creation of the site, and after. It depends on the owner and the severity of the project.

If the designer was given such data, he is obliged to take into account the frequency when designing the navigation of the site design. Sections, categories, levels of nesting pages.

The basic idea – HF sections in the site hierarchy should be above the BF, and so on. Again, this applies mainly to online stores, thematic portals / blogs and news sites. Or for corporate sites with a deep branching structure.