Do SEMs make better web designers?

Here's a little word equation for you.

If a well marketed website requires great search engine optimisation (SEO) to be found, great Internet Marketing techniques and design to bring potential customers to take your required action (i.e. buy from you), and then great Web analytics to see what has occurred...

...then it is true that a website designer who is not qualified in SEM is about as useful as a chocolate fire-guard. Whereas a Search Engine Marketer (SEM) who is perhaps not a brilliant designer is OK (but improvement needed, obviously) and a good designer qualified in SEM is fantastic!

The point is, if your website is not searchable it lacks a huge part of its armoury (some of my client websites get 40-50% total traffic via search). If the website is then insufficiently "sticky" to attract visitors and get them to take action it lacks 99.5% of its entire business purpose; and if you have no idea what is working and what is not you can do nothing about it.

So I think the above equation balances.
Designer not qualified in SEM = Chocolate Fireguard.

I am finding a sea change going on in my business. Some of my work is ab-initio creation of a website. But a lot of my work is what I'd call "second-generation" site design - i.e. a rewrite of an existing design to get a business properly marketed on the web and "working" for the client. This pre-supposes the client has an existing website which, however pretty, is doing a whole lot of nothing for them at the moment.

Now Briquesetclics.fr provides Internet Marketing, SEO and Design for small European businesses in South-west France: that is: the Limousin, Aquitaine and Poitou-Charentes. Small businesses either write their sites themselves or go to small business website designers. All it presently takes to become a web designer presently is to say you are one. I believe the writing is on the wall. In the current climate, clients have to get their websites working for them. If their designer is not accredited in some for of internet marketing, they will soon be out of business.