Should SEO Fall Under the IT Department’s Responsibility?

There seems to be a perception that SEO requires some technical expertise, and since it is technical, IT can just do the work. While there is a technical component to SEO, it requires way more than just technical chops, so I’d think long and hard before handing an entire SEO project to IT or a web designer.

Though you may need some of those individuals to assist you during the course of optimizing your website, it’s far from ideal to just give SEO duties to IT and expect best practices to be adhered to.

While many IT professionals are adept in many technical areas – for instance, making sure your website is crawlable to the search engines and setting up redirects and XML sitemap files – just remember that many IT personnel also work on things like setting up printers, which is … well … a different skill set than what’s needed to selectively run an SEO strategy.

“SEO is one of those acronyms that sounds like a flavor of rocket fuel – something that belongs in the hands of technoids with html street cred. With every new iteration of Google algorithms though, we are learning that SEO should really stand for being Simply Excellent Online. In other words, create remarkable content first, THEN work with the IT folks to make sure that what reads well also scores well technically.”– Paul Furiga

Extracted by Stanley Mak from our e-Book, “18 SEO Myths You Should Leave Behind in 2017.

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