14 March 2016

Web Design

The Relationship Between Web Design and SEO

You might be asking yourself, what is the correlation between a good website design and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?

Search engine optimisation is responsible for improving a website’s search engine ranking, allowing the website to generate more traffic and attract more leads. Once traffic has been generated, it is then the responsibility of the interactive and interesting web design to grab the attention of visitors and keep them interested.

It is pretty simple when you think about it. Websites that look amazing, typically offer little opportunity for on-page optimisation. On the other hand, pages that are well optimised, great for search engines, will often lack and compromise design and user experience.

This goes to prove that good web design and SEO are connected, because without good web design, SEO cannot reach its maximum potential. Therefore, a perfect combination of both ensures more people visit and choose to stay.

Take a look to understand how Web Design and SEO are related and what you can do to help your website reach its highest potential.

1. Effective URL structure: To have Google notice and pay attention to your website, it is important to code, design and optimize your web pages in Google’s ‘Language.’ This is why using effective URL structures is important. A good and effective URL consists of hyphens between keywords rather than numbers and symbols as this does not communicate any useful information to Google.
   
   
2. Image optimisation: The quality of images on your website is essential to assisting your webpages SEO potential. All images on your webpage should be the minimum size that they can be in order to be still as effective with appropriate tags coded to them. The smaller the image or logo, the faster it will load therefore it is important to compress the images as much as possible. Anything up to 3 seconds is deemed good, anything more and you will risk losing visitors.
   
   
3. Simple navigation: is critical in SEO. When you visit a website, you want to be able to find what you are looking for without hesitation. If this proves difficult, chances are you will give up and leave the website. It is therefore essential that when visitors come to your page, they stay there and click through other pages on your website. If your navigation bar is confusing, glitch, overly complicated, chances are visitors are likely to leave your site. Most importantly ensure the items in the navigation bar incorporate SEO keywords.
   
   
4. Responsive web design: In this era of smartphone and tablet devices, it is essential to ensure your website can be accessed from all these different devices. Much of the population is relying too much on devices other than desktops or laptops to browse the internet and therefore it is sort of mandate for companies to have responsive web design. Stay ahead of the game!

Features of a Good Web Design

Therefore, a good website should include some of the basic features which include:

• Folder structure
  
  
• Easy coding
  
  
• Appropriate page download time
  
  
• URL generation
  
  
• Internal linking structure

To conclude, SEO is fundamentally used to bring in visitors to your website. Once visitors have reached your website, the primary role of SEO ends and the basic role of website design takes place. Therefore an interactive web design and high quality content on the homepage will make sure visitors stay for longer periods of time and it will also ensure visitors stay interested and navigate to other pages on your site!

Remember: Web Design and SEO – Always, work hand in hand!

FDC Leicester has a great Web Design team dedicated to creating quality content and top website design working alongside our SEO specialists for maximum results. Give us a call today for a friendly chat on 01164 244 244 or send us a message and we will be happy to help.