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I like your point about hiring a SEO person that will help a site "rank well". The common misconception in SEO is that a site can easily climb to the first spot in Google. Ranking "well" is the best solution and this means having a wide span of keyword ranks in solid positions.

Very useful guidelines to pick a web designer
Quality Web Design

Hi Dave,
great post I dont think any SEO's would struggle to relate to this article. We are lucky in some respects because we have our own designers, programmers and SEO's so although we disagree on occasion it's all in house and doesn't have to involve the client. Of course more often than not we are still optimising sites built by other designers and in my opinion one of the most common issues is when designers claim to be SEO experts too when they don't have a clue.

So often a client approaches us having already paid a designer to implement On Page optimisation, okay so how did you choose your keywords er I gave them to him......here we go!

SEO is pretty much an ongoing process though, so whilst it's nice to work with the designers from the start, I try to see it as an ongoing relationship throughout the whole time that the site is live.

SEO Darlington

Great article! A lot of business owners assume that web designers can do SEO. In reality, web designers who are even aware of SEO are hard to come by. Web designers are trained with graphic design as their background. In order to achieve the right look and feel, they would compromise everything at any cost of search engine friendliness. SEO, on the other hand, is about algorithm and numbers, with little to do with graphics or visuals.

We have seen many cases in which the newly designed site has to be completely rebuilt because it is built without any SEO consideration.

Yes, there are companies out there who have talent in both areas. Working with one of them can save you a ton of money.

Many designers and SEO's talk about div vs url for SEO friendly design, but tables are fine and work fine in 99% of ranking websites.

I would tend to agree - DIV / CSS driven CMS systems are the way to go in terms of design and sEO.

Great article Dave

One of the best articles I have read in a long while, ty. I love the conversation between the SEO and the web designer... rings a few bells :) I am amazed by the amount of nice looking websites I come across that are designed with not even basic SEO tactics!

Stuart, Web designer and SEO Chester Cheshire UK.

The kind of web design that is the least expensive is often the most productive for Search Engine Optimization purposes.  No flash, no fancy scripting, text instead of graphical links, ect,  the simpler the web design, the easier it is to read by the search engine spiders. And, no sitemap submission is required,  just a simple add url submission will do the trick. Pay your web designer less money and get better results with the search engines. 

Low Cost Web Design

There definitly needs to be a harmoney of seo and web design with every design to maximize traffice and conversions.

Do you think that there needs to be a focus on SEO from a design standpoint when picking a designer as well?

Well put.  This is a great article about choosing the correct SEO web designer.

Its good to be selective with your web designer and follow guidelines when picking.  The best guideline I can offer is get some referals from other people in your industry