There are a lot of web designers out there, and a lot of firms advertising the “best web design” available. We are of the school of thought that an effective web design is one that brings traffic to your website and revenue to your business. For that reason, you won’t see us recommending Flash, you won’t see us recommending HTML templates, and you won’t see us recommending a design without SEO.
For a web design to be effective, you must have SEO. A thumbnail explanation of SEO is that the site speaks to the search engines in their language. It is optimized for the search engines. Why is that so crucial? Because the number of pages on the Internet is increasing at an exponential rate, and the competition for page 1 in Google, Yahoo or Bing will grow in intensity. It will be more & more difficult to rank on page one. In the more competitive niches, it is already impossible to rank on page one without good SEO; that will become the case for every niche in the very near future.
Good SEO can mean many different things; in terms of SEO web design, “good SEO” means on-page factors. Yes, you will also need to market your site to insure top placement in the search engines; on-age SEO factors are not enough in most cases (unless you are in an extremely tiny, non-competitive niche or hyper-niche) to insure top placement in Google, Yahoo and Bing.
The two go hand in hand.
The old school way of doing things was to create a website and then go hire a separate SEO expert to optimize it, oftentimes completely changing what the designer did because it was actually harmful for your search engine rankings.
Before you hire a web designer find out what their experience is with SEO and make sure that they can build SEO into the design of the site.