Website design is a skill. Although there are some gifted self-taught designers out there, many people in the web design industry have spent years gathering qualifications in order to provide their clients with the best site possible. The industry has its disreputable types, like any other, but mostly you can be sure that a web designer will do a good job on how your site looks.
What you can’t be sure of is whether the web design will help your site in being picked up by the search engines.
This is the cause of a fair amount of friction between the web design and SEO industries. Web designers, who have highly developed technical skills, often either assume that their site designs will be perfect for the web as is, or, when they do apply some optimization in the design stage, overestimate their SEO skills. SEO professionals get grumpy at this, because they have to straighten out the mess left behind.
Design is often treated as a separate issue from optimization, and this is a natural mistake to make. SEO is, after all, a branch of marketing. However, SEO is so affected by a site’s design that it can be well worthwhile accessing the services of an optimization consultant right from the beginning of the design process. You can talk to our consultants about design and SEO at SEO Consult Australia.
How design gets in the way of SEO
There are a few areas where web design and search engine optimisation will clash on your site, if you have accessed these services in isolation. The first one is the structure of the site. Web designers usually work to a visual aesthetic, creating a site that is pleasing to the eye. They will take your business requirements on board, but the way in which pages flow into each other will usually be designed to be visually impressive.
This gets in the way of optimization more often than not. Search engine optimization is based on the way humans relate words. The search engines base their algorithms on this. If your pages are linked together in a logical sequence of relevance, it’s more likely that the search engines will rank your pages higher.
Another way in which web design often gets in the way of optimization is layout. Designers like room. They like pictures. They like graphics. Search engines, however, like text. As time goes by, sites need more and more text in order to compete for the best spots for their keywords. This means that some of the more ‘clean page’ design principles have to be thrown out the window.
Don’t cling to design principles
When it comes down to it, having pretty pages is not going to get your site very far. Appearance is important when it comes to online success, this is true, but when the time comes for your site to be optimized, it’s important to listen to your consultants. It’s usually better to sacrifice some design elements in order to have a search-competitive site.
