Does Web Design Play a Role in Search Engine Optimization?

Many people who decide to venture out into world of search engine optimization sometimes jump the gun quite a bit. You wouldn’t paint a car or a house without putting some primer down would you? SEO and web design work the same way. Everything from the coding to the actual website and graphic design play a big factor when a business wants to tackle SEO for their website. A website should have even ratios of content and images along with verified code in order for the search engines to greet a website with open arms. Here are some important factors to look at when building a website or tweaking out your current design.

1. Website Code: The code of your website should always be extremely clean. Keeping it clean smooth and strong is when you will see the best results. Sometimes when websites are built there is much more coding than what is really needed. If you are building a website from scratch this is the time to really put this into gear. You don’t want to have to rebuild your website six months down the road because the search engines don’t recognize the coding style.

2. Link Structure: Often time’s websites that have CMS systems run into problems when you try to apply some SEO efforts to your link structures. Try making those URL structures unique and custom so that you can benefit from all SEO potential for that specific website page.

3. CSS Problems: Sometimes when building a website you could have a great deal of CSS files. Keep the files clean and to a minimum so that your website is as efficient as it can get. This will be important when the search engines start looking for your website and ranking it.

4. Images: Make sure you use images that are not too large in size. Page load will matter when it comes to search engines ranking your website correctly. Google takes into account many website factors and user experience is one. If takes a long time for pages of your site to load this will put a kink in your search engine optimization journey.

5. Flash Graphics: Use flash on your website to a minimum. Search engines can’t read flash so if your entire home page uses flash graphics rather than html and content the search will not rank your websites correctly in search results.

6. Internal Linking: Linking your pages internally to each other is very important. If you have pages that scroll down quite a bit it is important to have a bottom level navigation. User experience is important when it comes to search engine optimization efforts.

So to summarize make sure you have a cohesive road map of your website design and on site search engine optimization.