SEO In Your Web Design

Did you know that SEO is about more than code and content? It’s also part of your website design- or at least it should be! There’s more to a great site than just a pretty face (although that helps). An attractive design might make them stay and return but it’s SEO that probably brought them in first.

When designing a new site or redesigning an existing site, it’s important that you keep SEO in mind. In fact, when you do SEO from the very start of the process, you save yourself a lot of steps along the way. SEO is not just for marketers or businesses; it’s for anyone with a website. You want people to find you and know that your page exists. More importantly, you want the right people to find you. With proper SEO, the people who land on your website will already have an interest in what your site is about because they will have been searching for you based on keywords.

How Web Design Affects SEO

So how does your web design affect your SEO anyway? Well first, there are some elements of design that can interfere with your ability to be ranked higher in search. Anything at all that slows down the load time of your website or pages can hurt your SEO. People will click away and your bounce rate will increase if pages take too long to load. Visit our website to learn more today.

Fancy splash pages can hurt your SEO and make it harder for spiders to crawl your site. Plus, human readers are much less impressed with them these days and will often hit the back button as soon as they see a splash page rather than a regular home page.

Tips for SEO in Web Design

So now you know it’s important but how do you make it work? Here are some tips:

• Keep your code clean. Use simple, short file-names that make sense so it is easier for search bots to scan your pages and content.
• Use alt tags and meta tags with your photos and content.
• Design for text. Images are pretty but the content is the real meat of the site. So design based around where the text will be on the completed site.
• Avoid flash and animations that slow the site, detract from the content or contain messy code.

Do you have any tips or ideas to add on how to use SEO in your web design for a fully optimized and aesthetically pleasing website?

Ted Barrows is an SEO expert who loves to share his knowledge in posts and articles.