Web design and search engine optimization should have no rivalry between them. Both are considered to be the important aspects for having a good and friendly website. However, both are quite different, and it is easy for some to value one more than another. Website design and search engine optimization are two complementary processes, and one will be virtually useless without the other.
Your website will not be seen and/or will not rank well no matter how well-built it is without methods like search engine optimization. Working to make your website number one is also useless if your web page does not provide good user experience.
There are many websites that are being put up each day, and this makes the cyberspace a vast universe of clustered websites, each trying to get attention from visitors. If you search on Google for something, many choices appear. These are pages from sites that offer the information you are looking for.
There are many ways for them to get your attention. The owners can pay to advertise their sites on the internet and search engines, but the most popular way today is SEO, a long process that also brings about long-term results.
Search engine optimization is a complicated process whose main objective is to increase the ranking of a site through organic methods. You do not pay advertisers in this case, but you pay the people who will handle it if you cannot handle the job yourself. Search engine optimization is not a one-time affair but a continuous job. It includes the proper use of keywords, production of content, generation of backlinks, and so on.
It may sound simple, but it is a demanding task, especially for websites within highly competitive niches. When done successfully, it can pull your web pages to good positions on search engine results pages.
What if your site is on the Google search results and someone opens your site but finds too many animations and graphics? This is already beyond the control of any SEO specialist. This is where a web designer comes to work.
A web designer makes sure that your site will look good and appropriate, meaning it should be inviting to visitors and friendly to human visitors. There should be no clutter of running animations, and flash presentations that annoy most people. An appropriate-looking site means it should have a layout and a theme that depends on its purpose.
Web designers also ensure that the web page is easy for visitors to navigate around. People going to your website should find it easy to go from the home page to the different sections of your site and back. People who visit your web page do not like to spend a long time in finding what they want. Giving your visitors an easy browsing experience will make them want to stay longer which will give you quality traffic.
You put up your website to provide information to people, and they want information to be accessible. The website should be structured well that it attracts people to the content of your site and not to drive their attention away from it.
SEO is a wide range of methods on how to make a website friendly for search engines so their web crawlers can access all the important informations in the site and index them properly.
SEO will also make a website rank and target specific people properly. While SEO makes a website looks good to search engines, web designer will make a website looks good to human visitors.