Web Designer as SEO

A recent article in a guerrillaconsulting.com newsletter suggests that many web design pros will soon be faced, if not already, with the challenge of re-creating or designing sites for SEO. This is a very interesting concept.

If you design it... will they come?

While many companies see search as a major strategy in gaining visibility for their products or services, often times organic search takes place in a post-architecture or post-launch site analysis. A company will introduce a new web site with a wait-and-see approach... only to see spotty traffic as a result.

Does form follow function?

At what point in the development process do we introduce organic key phrase targeting, coding techniques or site architecture? The farther ahead in the planning process design and SEO are taken into consideration, the better the results. You can't always predict the where (page position) and the who (clicks) in organic search, but with some best practices in mind, you can design a site that will have a good chance of achieving both.