Why Is Web Design Important To SEO?

Proper web design practices are important to a search engine marketing campaign for a number of reasons. And at the end of the day, it won't matter how high your site ranks on the search engines if the site doesn't have quality content. Converting visitors to customers is the goal of your site and realizing this goal starts when the first design idea is conceived. Each page or section of your site should have a clear focus. Stay on topic and make sure the web page content is crawlable by search engines.

When we say "content" we mean plain text that relates to the main focus of your web site or page. If Java applets or scripts are used heavily on a page, the search engine robot will read that code first. If you have made the mistake of publishing a web page in Microsoft Word, your page will have a large amount of unnecessary text formatting. Embedding text in images is also a good way of harming the power of content relevancy. Anything that lowers the percentage of relevant text within the code of your page could be hindering your SEO efforts.

If your web developing company does not see the value of creating or modifying pages with SEO in mind, ditch them. The Internet is the world's fastest growing advertising medium, and the major search engines are the most popular place for people to search for products or services they want to buy. A good SEO plan can make or break your business' online goals.

For more reading on the topic of SEO and web design, read John Metzler's article titled "How Web Design Can Affect Search Engine Rankings" - it has been featured on several high profile web promotion newsletters such as SiteProNews and WebProNews.