Posted by BlueSEO on January 29th, 2010

I was talking to a friend of mine out of Los Angeles recently when the topic of web marketing expenses came up. He told me that he was paying two separate companies, one for his web design and another for his search engine optimization. He isn’t alone plenty of people think that web design and seo are two different animals, but really they are like a team of sled dogs – they work better together.

Why? To begin with there are ways to use web design to increase seo. Pages that use a clear hierarchy are much friendlier to search engines. Also, using meta tags and alt image text can also increase page rank. Information that is shown in flash or video formats can’t be scanned by search engines, and so page rank may fall.

The friend I was talking about in Los Angeles had this problem. His page included a really great video that showed the history of his company. Great! Except none of the information in the video was able to be read and counted for page rank. By simply including a transcript of the video he suddenly was able to have that information used for seo. It also made the page more accessible to people who may be viewing it at work where they don’t have speakers.

If he had used a web design company that also did seo then he wouldn’t have had this problem. The site would have been designed in a way so that everything worked together for the good of seo. This isn’t to say that if you already have a page that has been created you shouldn’t hire someone for seo. But for those people just beginning to get a web presence you should consider using them together.