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 your role in the website design process will probably dictate your answer.

Graphic design led companies will suggest in a high percentage of cases that the website design can be the only contender of course. And let’s face it without that visually attractive to the eye design a possible client will leave your site within a matter of seconds or so they would have you believe. But then that raises the issue of how did they come across your site initially?

The basic web design criteria or curve goes along the lines of web design is laid out using clients brief ..website design looks excellent and is given the go ahead. What about content ok, Take the text from our existing old site…..website goes live and time passes but no visitors!

And then more time until eventually perhaps 6-12 months later the situation is either so bad or the company are spending a fortune on adwords that finally a search engine optimisation company gets called in or the boss starts asking questions, and before you know it you are having to spend more than should be necessary on search engine promotion to try and achieve some search engine results.

Is this methodology going to allow a new(er) website to start on a competitive footing? The thousands of website owners that have followed this exact or similar path 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.

In reality the search engines paid no heed to the visual aspects of web design but with minimal attention to search engine optimisation so often this important first exposure when the website first gets indexed is totally lost, if all the search engines find is a appalingly optimised site with little 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 outstanding return on investment as invariably initial indexing is bound to achieve a far better SERPS position from the very start and it has been known for pre-optimised websites to hit a page one result straight away.

To find out more about search engine optimisation visit Southampton SEO Services .