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This exchange has happened with several clients over past few years. Even though I warn each new client that they must take care to avoid exactly this scenario when they have a site redesigned or upgraded. DON'T CHANGE FILENAMES, DON'T OVERWRITE TITLE TAGS, KEEP JAVASCRIPT & CSS STYLES OFF THE PAGE, ETC.
This week I had a client call asking why site changes he had agreed to a month ago had not been completed. I reminded him that he'd asked me to send those changes to his developer so that changes were in-house rather than giving me server access.
I've got a new excuse to use now. The developer did it, or in this case - didn't do it. This developer saw no need to post my thoroughly researched title tags, based on keyword density of each page, to every one of site's 300 pages. No matter that I'd spent days researching keywords, adjusting page text and massaging all title tags to match. The developer was busy.
The last straw for me came today though. A client called to find out if we could avoid extensive rework of his site needed to do "URL re-writes" that he'd agreed to do in contract we signed recently. Why? "My programmer tells me it will take him a month to do this without breaking site scripts." I reminded him that this had been discussed in our meeting last month when programmer balked at all work that would be required of him.
No problem, I said, we can go another route, but it will cost you twice as much for my immediate work and ultimately more than three times as much in your Pay-Per-Click budget FOREVER. You won't rank nearly as well in organic search listings.
Most of your site will never be indexed by most search engines unless you pay for mass URL inclusion, and that only works for one search engine - Yahoo, since everyone else has stopped paid inclusion programs. Google doesn't offer paid inclusion. (Google and partners send nearly 70% of search traffic to him and most other sites.)
"Oh!", he exclaimed. "Well, ultimately programmer will do what he's paid to do, like it or not."
Hmmm. Well I like it. Maybe my best weapon against developers and programmers opposed to SEO requirements will be those PPC budgets and Google's lack of paid inclusion program.
Mike Banks Valentine is SEO for http://InsuranceDirectory411.com and http://Auto-Accident-Lawyer-Directory.com where he had some of the experiences detailed in the article above.
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