What Effect Does Your Web Design Have On Your Rankings?
Web design is one of the first major decisions any new entrant into the online world has to make. And it’s an ongoing process that needs constant review. Does your web design affect your search rankings and should it be a part of your SEO program?
There are two areas to look at when it comes to web design. There is the aesthetic look – this does not have any direct effect on your rankings. It can, however, heavily influence other important factors that will affect your search rankings. Search engines only read the code, they don’t see the pretty (or not so pretty) colours, the pictures or fancy text. A search engine couldn’t care less if your font is Gothic, Verdana, or even Old English script. The HTML code is all the same.
Aesthetic web design factors that can influence search rankings include:
- Page load speed – reported to be one of the next issues that Google will look at,
- User bounce rates – If users don’t like what they see, they will march with their feet,
- Inbound links – First impressions count so if you ask a webmaster to link back to your site and your web design is inappropriate – chances are that webmasters will refuse your link request.
What about the code itself? It is in the writing of the code that SEO should have a heavy influence. We have the usual list of SEO factors such as meta tags that require careful thought. Other areas of code writing that could be important include content load sequencing. This dictates what loads to the screen first; sidebars, ads or text, to name a few.
There seems to be strong support for the theory that placing your keyword optimized content as close to the top of the code as possible may benefit your rankings. This may no longer be as true as it once was. Several years ago the search engine spiders would only read a certain portion of any page – if your content was too low on the page (in code terms), then it ran the risk of not being fully read. These days, the only real obstacle to having all of your content read is if there is a break in the code somewhere ( eg, JavaScript error). Having your code as close to the top as possible means the code is read before any code break occurs.
Your web design can heavily influence your rankings. Plan carefully, making it as aesthetically pleasing as possible whilst at the same time making the site navigation as simple as possible. Consider your users first and the rest will follow naturally.
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