Get found.

I know, you're right. Most designers and front-end developers don't really care about SEO. That's something for the marketing team to figure out, right? Not in my experience. I kind of stumbled across the SEO world by accident. Sure, I knew the importance of having meta data in the header of a site, but that was pretty much the extent of my SEO knowledge. Long story short, I was looking for a career change and happened to cross the paths with someone that worked at The Search Agency and was looking for help on the linking and promotions team. So I applied for the job, ended up landing it, and was submerged in the sea of Google. In a short period of time I learned the various disciplines involved in proper SEO: Site structure, content and linking/offsite promotions. I learned the importance of site structure including page titles, heading tags, crawl paths, content siloing, alt text, user generated content, site maps, robots.txt,  blah, blahblah, blah blah. There are literally thousands of small ins-and-outs that going into properly structuring a site so Google, Yahoo! and Bing can index every page of your site. The goal? More pages indexed equals more opportunities to rank for more keywords. Now optimizing content is a whole other beast I had no clue about. Keyword research based on search volume. Creating separate pages for each target keyword. Optimizing meta data, title tags, heading tags, identifying on-page keyword density and word count while maintaining the integrity and readability of the content is truly an art-form. Crafting content so search engines see you as an authority on a keyword topic while still providing the end user with the content they want is really difficult. But TSA employs some smart people that are able to do just that. Ultimately, you want quality, keyword-rich content that search engines think is authoritative on every page that they have in their index. If you accomplish that, you are going to rank much better. Lastly, linking. I'm still confused as to why they hired me to do this. I had no idea how it worked or why it was important. But I sure do now. Search engines see inbound links to a website as votes for that website. However, unlike the votes we enjoy in our democracy, not all votes on the internet are created equal. Finding sites that are relevant to the keywords you are targeting is an arduous process. Next is identifying which of those sites are most valuable. Then initiating contact with the webmasters and discovering an opportunity to acquire a link on their site is a tedious process. Once you have a link, then you have to maintain it and monitor it so you can ensure you are getting the proper incoming link juice. Multiply that process by 100 links a month, then multiply it again by 15  for the number of clients I was in charge of, and you get an understanding of my day-to-day. The reward was seeing improved rankings as a direct result of my efforts. Essentially, as quality inbound links are built to a site, rankings improve drastically. Some people say SEO doesn't work, or that it's all smoke and mirrors. However, I have witnessed the benefit that effective SEO can have on a client, their traffic, their conversions and ultimately, their business and I can say confidently that SEO works. I do my best to incorporate site structure best practices when organizing and coding a site because I know the benefits that proper structure can have. And while I think SEO is beneficial, it's simply not sexy enough to hold my attention - that's why you need to hire me as a designer.