Form vs. Function: Why you don't have to pick between SEO and great design	Visited: 1889 4.9/5.0 (15 votes total) Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
by Brian Easter January 04, 2011

Intro

Sometimes, you just want things to work.  It doesn’t matter if it’s pretty, polished, or perfect; efficacy is all you care about.  Other times, you want to enjoy the experience at your leisure, and appreciate the beauty of the experience.  This is often the main issue in the major battle between SEO and design. So how can you reconcile these two needs?

Concise vs. Dense

Designers worship the mininimalist ideal, and that’s not a bad thing, unless you’re a hard core SEO expert.  For SEO, most of the time, more content is better content.  Reconciling this stance with people who regularly use pictures to describe their ideas can be one of a website’s biggest challenges. 

Nobody wants to look at a page full of text, but then again pretty pictures don’t make you rank number one.  If your designer is dead set on using multiple images over the majority of the landing page, use techniques like adding keywords in tags and caption. 

If, on the other hand, you can’t convince your SEO team to cut down on the text, remind them that traffic doesn’t mean anything if it doesn’t lead to conversions.  Few visitors are willing to read what amounts to a short article to understand your brand message.  Don’t forget to account for the type of client your site is targeting; art galleries and artistic sites may rely more heavily on graphics while technical sites provide abundant opportunities for SEO optimization.  However, although pictures are worth a thousand words, they may not be worth 1,000 visits. 

Emotional vs. Literal Engagement

Metrics can’t measure human engagement; therefore it’s not exactly a priority with SEO specialists.  With designers, it is the sum total of their efforts.  Again, designers and SEO specialists have a tendency to square off over what is more important, literal or emotional engagement. 

Literal engagement includes actions such as clicks, pageviews, and visits, whereas emotional engagement is the obviously intangible enjoyment viewers receive by visiting a particular website.  Convincing an SEO specialist that emotional engagement is critical is similar to convincing a civil engineer to add decorative sewer covers to their design; it just doesn’t compute.   

However, there is an undeniable link between the emotional and literal engagement browsers experience.  Persuading SEO specialists and designers to understand the complementary nature of the two types of engagement can be challenging, but ultimately rewarding when both can be successfully integrated into website design.

Navigation vs. Crawability

Anyone who has at least dabbled in SEO knows that using internal anchor text is one of the established means of indicating a website’s focus.  This same anchor text is also what browsers will use to navigate the page, creating a tug of war between keywords that will highlight keyword focus and links that will promote easy navigation of the site. 

Both sides can easily argue their point; driving traffic is pointless if visitors immediately leave the site, and an easily navigable site is pointless without visitors.  SEO specialists may argue for flat site architecture, with most pages being one or two links from the homepage.  Designers will quickly rebut that the same flat site architecture confuses visitors and makes websites confusing and unmanageable.  By incorporating innovative navigation within pages, and keeping navigation menus straightforward, both SEO specialists and designers can be satisfied that navigation and crawability will be optimized.

Value vs. Link Incentive

Creating unique content is an excellent SEO strategy, and who better to make this content than designers?  The key to making successful content that can also be developed as a link incentive is promoting the common aim of SEO and design.  Ideally, you will create content that people want to use.

Churning out content merely for the sake of a web presence and in the vague hope of generating something, anything, people might share is a strategy ultimately doomed to failure.  On the other hand, creating elegant content about a topic the majority of your target audience has never heard of is a waste of resources that could benefit your client. 

Conclusion

Good SEO can lead someone to your site, but if the site has terrible design, your efforts have been futile.  On the other hand, a perfectly designed website is meaningless if nobody visits it.  Ideally, SEO and design support each other and create a website that is a joy to use, and easy to find.  Remind your web design agency and SEO specialists that they are working towards a common goal, not waging a turf battle.