Good web design is also important for rankings success

Talk about search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine ranking results and the first thing that comes to your mind will definitely be working on content and your links – optimizing them so that search engine crawlers would rank your site high enough. But you will be surprised to know that good website design is also a factor in achieving good search engine rankings. Unfortunately, you cannot just rely on your website designer to handle these things. Most designers may be good at design but may not know enough about SEO.

Here are some things that you should pay attention to and to talk to your designer about when it comes to improving your website design for SEO purposes.

Content Management Software

If a content management software (CMS) is being used to handle the content of your website then there are some features that you should be aware of. Make sure that your CMS can give you the flexibility to use different templates for different sections and pages. This gives you the flexibility to optimize content on a per page level. Your CMS should also allow you to put your own customized Title and Meta tags on the different web pages. This is another way of optimizing each page to the best possible settings, so to speak. Finally, your CMS should be able to generate static HTML pages and not just dynamic pages. Search engines have a hard time reading dynamic web pages. Google doesn’t even index dynamic URLs with more than two parameters within the URL. Indexing is important because you won’t get a ranking even if you have the strongest SEO efforts.

CSS Stylesheet

Using a CSS stylesheet for website design formatting is a good thing to do because it helps keep your website’s appearance uniform. Some website designers use internal CSS as a way of making things convenient, this is one thing that you shouldn’t allow to happen. External CSS stylesheets should be used because the HTML coding is more concise.

HTML code compliance

Ensure that the HTML codes used on your website is compliant with HTML standards such as the W3C. Some experts say that non-compliant web design is harder for search engines to index.

Graphics

Do not forget to also optimize the imprint of your graphics. Since search engines have a preference for text, avoid putting graphics at the top of the website as much as possible.

Flash

A Flash-enabled site looks visually appealing. But in SEO terms it is useless. Search engine crawlers look at Flash as graphics, which it cannot index, thus not helpful in boosting your rankings.

Web design don’ts

There are ways to make your website search engine friendly. You must avoid using frames because search engines find it difficult to index all of the framesets. Also, do not use re-direct methods. Website designers usually make re-direct pages or use Javascript re-direct techniques as a way of re-directing visitors from one page to another – these are the same techniques used by search engine spammers. These are techniques that could lead to your website being banned.