DMR #17: Chris Von Nieda – What comes first – SEO or website design?

David: What comes first - SEO or website design? Is it essential for SEO and website design to work closely together? What's the future for SEO? These are just three of the questions that I intend to ask today's special guest Chris Von Nieda. Chris, welcome to DMR. Chris: Thanks, David. A pleasure to be here. David: Chris is the founder of ROI4My.com a website design and SEO service provider based in Arizona. Chris, you got involved in website design way back in 1998. How did you end up building an interest in SEO? Chris: It's great that you're able to build websites, David, but, of course, if no one knows about your website or no one is finding your website, then that really defeats the purpose. Of course, if you're building a website to grow your business or to make money on revenue or provide services for a client, you've got to get people to the site and get them to perform the actions that you want when they arrive at the site in order to be successful. David: That's a very progressive website design service provider because I've certainly seen a lot of websites that visually look appealing but if you looked behind the source code, they're absolutely scary in terms of being optimized to be found in Google. Chris: Yeah, that definitely can be the case. You had mentioned when a website is being developed, how important it is that they have the SEO required elements in place. For example, if you're developing your website and you don't have things like your heading tags properly formatted according to Google's Webmaster guidelines, that could impact your search engine rankings and decrease the amount of traffic to your site. Google makes it pretty easy. They provide Webmaster guidelines and a terrific SEO starter guide that if you just read that and apply the principles that they're kind enough to pass along, in most cases, you can build a pretty nice website and have it ranked well in the search engines coming out the gate.