Thank you for your comment Lyena. I think that I should have been more clear in using the terms developer | designer. I find lots of lines being blurred with designers who can code, coders who can design, marketers who can build websites, etc. In my business I deal primarily with the small to mid-size company, and what I often find is that business owners don’t understand that just building a website isn’t enough, it needs to be optimized. This was really the perspective from which the article was written. I wanted my main take away to be that SEO should be a number one priority when building a website. I agree with point three, you may need a team to accomplish this or maybe one person can do it all for you – just make sure you don’t ignore seo.

These are some good points. My background is in web development and I could add one more piece of advice for the pre-contract stage:

1. If a web developer is not very responsive during “pre-contract” phase, they will disappear on you after you sign the contract. Run.

2. If they throw a lot of lingo at you and you do not understand their answers to your questions, run. Take it as an indication that they are not listening to your needs. Their goal is to quickly deliver something you will most likely hate, and be done.

3. SEO is not a web developer’s job. Yes, they need to understand the importance of it, but just because you know how to code does not mean you are an expert on optimization, conversion, seo, ppc, etc. When hiring an agency, make sure they have design talent for pretty pictures and layouts, development team for back end coding, and and SEO experts to help your website with online presence.

Those were my 2 cents summarized in 3 points.