Great Content vs. Beautiful Design
If you had to pick one.
Alana B. from Mom's Returning to Work .com asks:
Is it better to have and continuously build great content (with appropriate keywords in the posts) in order to drive traffic to your site, or to have a beautifully designed (but less content-driven) website, so that, with less time spent on writing the content, you can devote more time on twitter on facebook driving traffic to your site?
Short answer: great content.
And frankly, I wouldn't worry too much about keywords and other SEO-ish1 tactics at this point. On-page optimization (and to a lesser extent, source code optimization) can make a difference in search engine rankings, all else equal—but seldom is all else equal. What's far more important than SEO for ranking in search engines and getting traffic to your website is the number of quality links to your website, from diverse and respected sources on the web (like the one I just gave you above).
For example, I could have the suckiest web page in existence about "The Care And Feeding Of Albino Ferrets" when it comes to visual design and SEO, but if I somehow convinced a thousand pet store owners, animal trainers, celebrity ferret whisperers, zoo keepers, and other albino ferret owners to link to my article about this hard-to-find-in-the-snow weasel, it would rank number one in Google for many of the terms people used to in the link-text to point to it on their websites...even higher than someone with a similar article, hosted on a website designed by Steve Jobs himself, assuming the latter had only a few links.
SEO Pitfalls
Something else to keep in mind about SEO: there are very real pitfalls and risks associated with doing it wrong. What Google and other search engines like the most on a web page, is authoritative information, linked to by known and respected experts within a niche, written by a human being.
The danger in trying to optimize your content with the right keywords, is that it's contrived. It doesn't read as well as it would if your primary concern in writing it was to be useful, engaging, and personal. And what does not read well, does not get linked to, and therefore, does not create traffic.
My advice: be the writer you are, and don't worry one wit about SEO, at least until you've already built up substantial traffic to your website. Then, and only then, start paying attention to things like keyword frequency, meta-description tags, and all of that. An advantage to this "write first, optimize later" approach is that you'll have useful data inside of Google Analytics about what pages on your site are doing well, and where your traffic is coming from. These stats will provide you a lot of insight into how your SEO might be improved.
What About Design, Though?
It occurs to me now, that your question was more about great content vs. great design, and not so much about great content vs. SEO, but I thought it was important to distinguish between great content and the concept of SEO, because they're different pursuits, and people too often equate them. Anyway...
Yes, even with great content, design is still important.
And it's becoming more important all the time. With more amazing material posted online in a single day than you could ever read in your entire life, the more attractive, more professional looking website will hold the attention of your audience far better than one that looks straight out of 1995.
Bottom line, great content vs. beautiful design is a false choice.
You shouldn't pick one, because you need BOTH. And with the abundance of well designed (and already SEO optimized) website building tools available, and the number of quality web pros who can help you with design, you can have great content and great design, no compromises needed.
Thanks again for sharing your question, Alana. I hope that helps. And feel free to post in the comments.
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