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 suggest in a large proportion of cases that the website design is most important of course. And let’s be honest without that visually pleasant to the eye design a possible client will leave your site within a very short space of time or so they lead you to believe. But then that raises an even more challenging question how did they find your site in the first instance?

The most common web development curve goes along the lines of a few website visualisations are presented to client ..website design looks excellent let’s go for it. We need some content ok, Take the text from our existing old site…..site gets published and time passes but no traffic!

And then even more time passes by until eventually perhaps many months later the situation is either so bad or the company are having to spend out on adwords that finally an SEO company 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 get noticed by the search engines.

Is this the fast road to success? 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 far too long, and even more frightening  results in lost profit, lost time and lost potential customers.

I don’t think that any web expert would argue against the fact that the search engines don’t rank on the visual aspect of web design but with scant regard to optimisation so often this first opportunity to make an impact when the site first gets indexed is totally lost, if all the search engines find is a appalingly optimised site with minimal regard paid to any SEM requirements or keyword capture.

An additional in reality small investment spent on pre development SEO ,for example keyword research and optimisation gives an rewarding return on investment as invariably initial indexing is bound to achieve a far better search engine position from day one and it has been known for pre-optimised websites to hit a page one result straight away.

To find out more about SEO visit Affordable SEO Southampton .