In my humble experience – covering 25 years of IT working for Fortune 100 companies in NYC, I’ve worked with many a web designer. What web designers don’t tell you upfront usually is that they don’t know SEO. That covers more than 90% of all web designers. My point has always been in this business if no one goes to your website what good is it? You can have the prettiest website in the world and if it sits at a ranking of #400 for it’s main keyword phrases on Google, are you getting any ROI return on investment at all from your development costs?
It’s better to have a site that is more functional and easy to navigate than it is to have one that is pretty with moving flash components. That being said I also have to add it’s absolutely critical that your site ranks well on search engines for you to gain any business value from it. Therefore it must be SEO’d properly. Every page must be worked by someone who knows SEO at least to tune the meta tags. Without the meta tags being tuned up, the chances for a web page to rank well are limited or a long shot at best. Meta tagging is essential.
Next time you are talking with a web developer, ask her or him how they are going to ingetrate SEO into your latest website? If they don’t have a clue, get an SEO to help immediately. New websites that have good meta tags get ranked way faster for key phrases and somethings they can be competitive immediately after the site is launched.
