7 Ways Web Design can Affect your SEO Productivity

A well-designed website can attract millions of visors easily and help them to find what they are looking for. But, did you ever consider that website design elements can also affect the effectiveness of SEO? It may sound a bit strange, but it is 100% true. Actually, website design affects a number of factors that lands in the sphere of SEO such as site’s ranking on different search engines, its loading speed, payment gateways, content displaying, etc.

So, what are the main web design factors (from SEO perspective) that web developers should keep in mind while designing websites or its pages? Just observe Some important considerations outlined below-

1. Website structure and size

Website structure and size matters a lot when it comes to the site’s ranking on search engines. Google, world’s leading search engine, always look for the uniquely built websites to offer the best results to the Internet users. If your website structure is complicated and is heavy, then there is high probability that Google may not prefer your site (for displaying results against the entered keywords ) considering it irrelevant for users.

Therefore, you should keep your website design easy, simple and minimalistic as far as possible. It will allow users to navigate your site easily, find the information they need and spend more time on the website. All these significantly affect your SEO efforts and increase the usability of your site up to a great scale.

2. Valid HTML coding

Valid HTML coding is essential for website promotion. Search engines need to parse the HTML code of websites to find their content and display in search results. When search engine crawlers visit websites or its web pages, they look whether they are complying with the HTML standards or not. If you make mistakes in HTML coding, it is possible that search engines may not crawl and index your site, diluting your SEO exercise adversely.

Therefore, be careful while doing HTML coding. You can use HTML validator to find errors in HTML coding and eradicate them easily.

3. Responsive Design

In today’s modern World, people use a number of mobile devices to browse the Internet. So, it is important for web developers to create responsive websites that can perform consistently on all mobile devices apart from desktop computers.

The reason behind this is that Google prefers responsive websites while displaying results to users. If a website is not responsive to mobile devices, Google may decrease its ranking in search results. You may not face lots of difficulties to improve the ranking of such websites despite optimizing it with the best practices of SEO.

4. Page loading speed

Search engines consider page loading speed as an important factor to help users get the useful information at their fingertips in the least possible time. Most of the users always expect websites or its pages to load quickly on their devices. If a website is slow, people don’t like to visit it and look for its alternative.

There are many factors that contribute page loading speed significantly such as the enormous images, double-barreled code, unnecessary widgets, lots of ads, unoptimized app & plugins, etc. Just resolve all these issues to make your site fast and boost your SEO efforts.

5. Avoid Parallax Designing

These days, parallax designing is on move. People with restricted budgets are making parallax websites to have a solid online presence and increase their online business.

In fact, parallax websites are single page sites largely dependent on scrolling effect. The homepage of such sites contains lots of information and users have to scroll down to look for the content they need.

Creating parallax websites may be fun for web designers, but it is not good from SEO point of view. You may face the problem of keyword dilution and may not be able to optimize the website for a number of search terms used by visitors. You also face problem in inbound linking as there is no additional page to interlink.

Another problem with parallax designing is that it doesn’t perform well on mobile devices. So, you will have to create a mobile version of such sites separately if you want to increase traffic and get business opportunities. It may increase your expenses up to a great extent.

6. Dynamic Web Pages

Dynamic Web pages offer different content for different users (using the same source code file) based on the browser and operating system they are using. It helps them to view the personalized content for their needs.

But, dynamic URLs are complicated and have lots of special characters & codes. As search engines crawlers prefer static URLs, they may not index such pages.

You will have to edit dynamic URLs and add relevant keywords/terms so that search engine bots can crawl and index them easily.

7. Revamp your website design at regular intervals

Most of the website owners seem unwilling to redesign their website because of the fear of losing the existing traffic, business opportunities and revenues. Nevertheless, trends keep changing in website design from time-to-time. An old website design may seem boring for visitors and have a lower ranking in the SERPs of search engines.

As Google keeps updating its algorithm for SEO ranking of websites, a website with the latest web design can have a higher ranking in search engine results even with slightest SEO efforts.

Final Words

Website design and SEO are interdependent. Both are equally liable for the success/failure of a website. These are some important points that reflect how web-design can influence the SEO of your site. Just keep them in mind and enhance the effectiveness of your SEO efforts.

Author Bio:
Tracey Jones describes herself as a bit of a geek who is working as a professional with HireWPGeeks, a leading WordPress website design company. She loves writing useful insights about web design, SEO, SMO and WordPress. If you want to ask a question or to learn more about Tracey, follow her on twitter.