martinibuster - 6:32 pm on Jan 25, 2003 (gmt 0)

SEO and "marketing" one and the same?

Nope. In the main, Marketing is concerned about branding: the size of your logo, the look and visual appeal. These people will go in and wipe out your title tags, and replace them with the company name--- For the sake of consistency.

At worst, a marketing person's idea of improvements are at the childish level of matching the colors of your socks to your shirt. Brilliant ideas like, "Let's change the copyrights to 2003." (Like that's going to sell more toothpaste.)

Marketing departments have been the source of very bad web sites, too. There's the case of a local arts center that hired a Top Marketing Agency, and received a 10-second browser-crashing flash intro to a badly architected web site that dropped like a stone in the search engines! For this they paid thousands and thousands of dollars, (possibly in the over $100,000 range) as part of an identity redesign.

After six or so months their webmaster took back control and ditched the flash, and reorganized the web site in a saner manner.