Who is a web designer? No, it is not someone who designs spider webs!
Poor joke, but a web designer does design—he/she designs websites. Without his/her services’ making a site is virtually impossible. When, the question of SEO comes in, you have to have the best designer money can hire. There are several experts who are quite proficient in SEO services there are also people who are geniuses of web design and focus on how a website should look, and not rank. The former is type of web designer should be your weapon of choice when you are aiming to improve your page rankings. If you, by mistake, hire the latter type then your site will no doubt look good, but it will hardly be anywhere to be seen in the first few pages of search results.
You may want to do the optimization yourself if you have the fair idea but then again hiring an SEO expert to do a guy’s job who excels at graphic designing can still spell disaster. Usage of excessive graphics and media to improve site appearance also tends to badly affect page rankings and thus you are down the drain. You cannot optimize a site which goes against SEO guidelines like non-usage of too much of flash etc. So you need to hire the right guy for the right job. Why do it yourself when both graphics and SEO can be handled by experts at fees that don’t hurt your wallet?
If I told you to look for a chimera, most of you people wouldn’t even know what I’m talking about, let alone search for it. So if you have no idea about SEO then you won’t be able to find the right person for an SEO job because you wouldn’t know what you are looking for. So get yourself acquainted with the concept first. One of the best ways to search for the right person is to see sites SEO-ed by him/her and see the results. If the site’s rankings are good then you have found your expert. The sites speak volumes and act as recommendation to the person in question. If you see evident SEO mistakes on the site then he/she is not worth your time, but if you see that the design is streamlined and meets with all guidelines of optimization then do not wait as he/she may be picked up by your competition!
