Should I optimise my new website for SEO or is the design more important? This is a question that will raise a lively debate but your role in the website design process will probably dictate your answer.
A graphic designer based website development company will suggest in a majority of cases that the web design is most important of course. And let’s be honest without that aesthetically pleasing to the eye design a searcher will leave your site within a matter of seconds or so they would have you believe. But then that raises the big question of how did they get there in the first place?
The most common web development curve goes along the lines of visual design is storyboarded for client ..website design looks visually appealing and is given the go ahead. Needs some content ok, copy and paste something out of our corporate /company leaflet…..website goes live and time passes but no visitors!
And then more time passes until eventually perhaps more than a few months later the situation is either so critical or the company are having to invest in adwords that finally the SEO expert gets called in or the sales manager starts to question the lack of inbound enquiries from the web, and before you know it you are investing in a web marketing strategy to try and rescue some website rankings.
Is this really the best way to go? The thousands of website owners that have been through this exact cycle will certainly argue that it most definitely is not as this hope and pray web development criteria delays any websites success by unacceptable periods of time, and even more frightening results in thousands in lost profit, turnover and ongoing prospect capture.
Search engines need to find content and structure in order to rank a site well but with no attention to SEO so often this important first exposure when the website first gets indexed is totally lost, if all the search engines find is a poorly optimised site with minimal regard paid to any SEO requirements or keyword capture.
An additional in reality small investment spent on pre development SEO ,for example keyword research and optimisation gives an excellent return on investment as invariably when the site goes live and gets indexed it will achieve a far better search engine position from the very start and sometimes depending on the competition a page one result straight away.
To find out more about SEO visit SEO Services Southampton.
