Most experts will tell a new company bluntly that it should hire a website design team that specializes in SEO-friendly design. Anything less will only result in a less effective website or higher optimization costs in the future. Some less experienced website design teams will deny the importance of SEO for designers, but they are hopelessly mired in the past, before paid “organic” search engine traffic had become so central to online marketing. Fortunately for those firms that are not yet able to fully integrate SEO into their website design efforts, some basic steps and core competencies can easily be upgraded and adapted to compliment SEO better.
One of the easiest ways to integrate SEO into web design is to maximize efficient use of CSS. Deceasing HTML code, moving the components to CSS, and loading it externally will decrease page load times as well as make pages easier for search engines’ crawlers to index quickly. The other very simple design step that can immediately help SEO is to stop using Flash for anything important. Web crawlers struggle to access the information or links in embedded Flash or other rich media formats, so it is invisible from an SEO perspective. Dropping those will not just make the same amount of work have a bigger impact on SEO, it will also improve the page’s visual performance for most visitors.
These two points embody the basics of SEO-based design. Even when thinking in terms of more advanced design aspects, the goals all eventually point to improving factors that will increase search ranking. Many of them relate to making the site more accessible to web crawlers and easier to index more effectively, but others deal with quality scores and a myriad of other details that impact parts of search engines’ algorithms.
The final aspect of SEO for designers speaks to the second half of what a website must do. Beyond achieving a good search ranking for the site, site design should produce a website that converts visitors into customers or entices them to come back again for the quality of the content. What these are more the product of content creation and graphic design, site designers should absolutely have supporting these goals in mind throughout the project. Some see pleasing visitors and optimizing search rankings as opposing goals, but again, web designers that specialize in SEO understand how to build a site from the ground up to so that it is easy to modify and update, facilitates faster indexing and better quality scores to improve search ranking, and is visually effective and easy to use for visitors. The alternative is a site that doesn’t do all this and has to be repaired later once the copy realizes the importance of these two goals.
About the guest author: Ryan Michael Farrell is a search engine optimization analyst based out Los Angeles, California. To learn more about how SEO and effective CSS and web design can effectively compliment one another visit Wpromote.com
This is a unique article published on SEO Desk with exclusivity.
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