The common myth that web design and SEO are unrelated is slowly dying away as more and more business owners begin to understand how the two are intrinsically linked. Here’s a quick overview of some ways your web design can influence your SEO results.
Keyword Spread
A popular trend in web design right now is single-page websites. While these certainly have benefits in terms of reader engagement and ease of navigation, they can also be quite problematic in regards to SEO.
While more traditional web layouts present search engines with a rich database of URLs with diversified keywords to crawl, this one-page approach tends to cram all a company’s keywords under one URL. This can quickly set off alarms for search engines. When designing or redesigning your company’s website, it’s crucial you work with an agency that understands how to balance fantastic aesthetics with practical SEO principles.
Mobile Friendliness
One of Google’s algorithm updates earlier in 2015 looked purely at the responsiveness of website designs. In what was coined ‘Mobilegeddon’, this update resulted in websites that displayed poorly on mobile devices falling away from Google’s top results for searches performed on these devices.
This isn’t just a wakeup call in terms of mobile friendliness, though. As search engines invest more and more into tracking how well users respond to different sites (as well as using this information to influence search result rankings), the importance of quality web design in general will only increase.
The Info Behind The Images
Great web design involves plenty of visuals. On top of catching attention, the images you use on your website can also enhance your SEO. How? Through image descriptions and alt text. By designating appropriate, keyword-inclusive descriptions to your images, you can further increase the search engine visibility of your webpages.
These are just three of the many ways in which great design and strong SEO can go hand in hand. If you’d like to find out more about how this all works, we’d love to have a chat. With experts in both SEO and web design, we can position your business to climb its way to page 1 and look fantastic at the same time.
