What Comes First – The Web Design Or The SEO?

Should I optimise my new website for SEO or is the design more important? This really is the chicken and egg question of the internet age but the answer you give will be heavily weighed by the job you do.

Graphic design led companies will argue in a large proportion of cases that the website design can be the only contender of course. And let’s face it without that visually pleasant to the eye design a possible client will bounce off your site within a very short space of time or so they lead you to believe. But then that raises the big question of how did they find your site in the first instance?

The commonest web site design curve goes along the lines of visual design is storyboarded for client ..website design looks great let’s go for it. What about content ok, we’ll rustle something up…..site gets published and time passes but only minimal traffic!

And then more time passes until eventually perhaps 6-12 months later the situation is either so bad or the company are having to invest in adwords that finally website promotion firm gets called in (or somebody gets intrigued by one of those SEO e-mails that seem to hound webmasters these days), and before you know it you are on a 6 month search engine marketing campaign to try and get noticed by the search engines.

Is this a productive route to persue? The thousands of website owners that have travelled this route will certainly argue that it most definitely is not as this hope for the best web development criteria delays any websites success by months and sometimes years, and even more frightening  results in huge losses of both business opportunity and profitability.

Search engines need to find content and structure in order to rank a site well but with minimal attention to search engine optimisation so often this initial chance to make the best impact when the web site first gets indexed is lost, if all the search engines find is a appalingly optimised site with a miniscule focus or regard paid to any SEM requirements or keyword capture.

A little extra attention and money spent on pre development SEO ,for example keyword research and optimisation gives an worthy return on investment as invariably when the site goes live and gets indexed it will achieve a far better website ranking from the outset and occassionaly in not too competitive niches a page one result straight away.

To find out more about search engine optimization visit SEO Southampton .