Just like the age-old adage – “What came first – the chicken or the egg?”, a different question is doing the round these days. What is more important on the Internet – the web design or the SEO? This is the million-dollar question on everybody’s lips who are involved in online business ventures. However, it is not difficult to understand that both of them are important and go hand-in-hand to produce a resoundingly successful website.

The 2 types of web designs are the static and dynamic. The former is developed on the basis of the HTML code whereas the latter is based on advanced, complex and sophisticated technologies. Since the Web is a visual interface, people’s minds will reinterpret and manipulate the information presented in front of them. One has to be careful while using color effects, lights, positioning and size of contents and the visual effects. Web design is important from the conversion point of view – to convert the initial curious visitors into serious buyers of services, thus generating business for the website. A professional, aesthetically pleasing website converts more visitors into business prospects than an elementary, novice designed one. The design layout is the first thing that grabs attention and holds the visitor’s interest. But attraction works only up to a certain point. If there is no substance beyond the style, it would act in the detrimental interests of the website and actually drive the visitors away. The website may look great but you would be spending a small fortune on Ad words to generate traffic and ultimately an SEO expert’s services would be called for salvaging the situation.

SEO is the process of increasing traffic volume and traffic quality with regard to a website from various search engines via organic search results, targeting different kinds of search such as image search, industry specific vertical search, and local search engines, thus enabling web presence for the website.

SEO is important from the traffic point of view – it is the first thing that actually allows your website to come up on the search engine results. Once the initial presence has been felt and the initial traffic generated, it will further result in increased volumes later on. If the content is irrelevant or spammy in nature, no one will want to take it seriously. When constructed with specific tactics in mind, the extra hard work in SEO set up (META tag writing, keyword research, keyword rich content) will pay rich dividends in future.

It is an effective Internet marketing strategy taking into account what people search for and how search engines work. It involves editing the website content and HTML and coding to make it more relevant to specific keywords and gives access to indexing activities of the search engines.

Both SEO and web design are equally important and relevant but if I had to choose, I would definitely pick SEO over the web design aspect. Once the site starts generating traffic, one can analyze the data and feedback, understand the needs of the visitors and change accordingly, by altering or restructuring the design of the website to make it more visitor-friendly and improve conversion rates.

What do you think? SEO or Web Design – which one comes first?