I'm very curious to find this out.... It seems like most of the web design companies that my clients used (I own a SEO company) don't offer SEO. Or if they do, they throw up some title tags and call it a day. I can understand why as its a full time job in it of itself, but I would think a medium sized firm would have a SEO department. Do you get many solicitations from SEO firms that want to form relationships? (IE: Give you a percantage of sales they make to your customers?) -Erick
I offer both web design and search engine optimization services. Most web designers don't really know much about seo. Some web designers are still getting away with image-heavy or flash-heavy web sites. In my experience, you can't do a good seo without having access to the site. It is not just change the title tags. Most of the sites I have seen that need to be optimized need to site re-design first. Otherwise, all seo work won't get you the real benefit of it.
Yea I agree with you there. Thats a whole different subject though. I think flash and image based design is good only for companies that either dont need good organic rankings because they are HUGE already and their brand name is good enough or if design is just more important to them. I think you can use CSS and still make a site gorgeous with the whole new web 2.0 feel (like mine of course search-placement.com) without sacrificing design. But then again even all image based sites and flash sites can be fixed, an image based site can always add text content and theirs coding to make the search engines view text in a flash site as html. The bottom line is web design firms need to realize their clients won't be successful unless their client sites get traffic too. If you want your clients to be successful I would think you would consider that...