5 Ways Your Web Design Impacts Your SEO

It is easy for web developers to conclude that the parts of their sites they can see and interact with don’t have quite as much to do with search engine optimization as the data in their articles, pages, and lists do. After all, according to the conventional wisdom, search engines only look at keywords and keyphrases.

Those same developers, and even a few site owners and webmasters might be surprised to learn there is a lot more to search engines than keywords and keyphrases. While it is true the data on your site matters for SEO purposes, where that information appears and how it relates to the rest of your site is equally important and in some cases more important.

So where should you start looking if you’re interested in what parts of your design might be positively or negatively affecting your SEO efforts?

Getting a new visitor to your website can require considerable effort. Keeping them around long enough for your website to have any effect on your relationship with that potential new customer or reader requires your site to provide them with whatever they are looking for as fast as possible.

For example, if you are running a restaurant site, your menu should be prominently placed so any guest can find it. If it is not placed well, new visitors may leave quickly, which will signal search engines that your site might not belong in the highest search results. The same goes for important information like location, directions, hours, any special offers and so forth.

Anything that causes a user to hesitate or be unable to find the “next step,” so to speak, is likely to cause problems for search optimization. The reason is the same as the access issue. Users need to be able to find important information easily. The route, however, from here to there also has to be clear and unambiguous. This is one of the many reasons sites often have a line of links across the top edge of every page that function very much like an application menu.

This is vital for any site that isn’t a simple brochure. If a user goes “exploring” on your e-commerce site, for example, the last thing you want is for them to end up lost and unable to get back to the homepage. A good exploration experience increases time-on-site, which will make your site more competitive in search.

Most search engines expect all but the simplest sites to have some form of content management system or CMS running on their server. A CMS is usually the combination of a database and a set of middleware that allows sites to completely separate the presentation of their pages from the data in them. This was one of the original goals of cascading style sheets, or CSS, which is one reason CMS architectures rely heavily on style sheets for consistency. Using a CMS gives search engines conventional points of reference and allows your site to be indexed faster and more efficiently, which leads to better results.

 Search optimization is practically guaranteed to be a continuous need for almost every website. If you are considering building or updating your site, it is vital that you think about the effects your design decisions will have in addition to the information you present.

Resources
https://digitalfireflymarketing.com/our-blog/impact-web-design-seo/
https://searchengineland.com/seo-website-design-everything-need-know-272899
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/top-10-mistakes-web-design/
https://www.stlseoco.com/
https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_responsive.asp