Web Design And SEO – A Match Made In Heaven

When you start creating a website, there are two major things you should keep in mind. The first one is the consumer, and the second is search engines. However, many people don’t quite understand the relationship between web design and SEO. The main reason for that is they relate design with visual aspects, and SEO affects how the site is found, so at first, it may seem like these two things are completely separate sides of your website. There is some truth in this because SEO experts and web designers are taking care of completely different tasks, but they actually do them hand-in-hand and complement each other. In this article, you will learn more about the complex connection between web design and SEO, how to be sure they are working together, and what that means for your website. Let’s start.

Website Navigation

When creating a website, web designers are focused on overall look and user experience, while SEO marketers will say that you need to focus your navigation efforts on optimizing for search engines. The goal is to have a site that has organic search visibility and is easy for users to navigate and make purchases. One more reason to keep your website’s navigation simple is that it lowers the chances that your visitors will get confused and leave your website, and that means lower bounce rates and better ranking.

Content

From the text to animation and everything in between, content informs and engages the users, and leads them to purchase. However, Google does not treat all content equally. For example, a “.jpg” image with text overlay is not considered as a content to a search engine. The search engine will see the image, but it will not be able to read the text unless it is written in an HTML text code. Because of that, SEO teams are pushing more content, but the web design team should ensure that the copy is not conflicted with the user experience. Once the SEO experts determine what kind of content is needed, the design team should find a solution that ties everything together into a cohesive unit.

Mobile-Friendliness

The usage of smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices is rapidly increasing, and your site needs to be accessible to all of them. This will not only help you get better user experience, but it will also help you rank better in the search results since mobile-friendliness is considered as one of the most important ranking factors for Google. The best way to make sure that your site is mobile-friendly is the usage of the responsive design. A responsive design will also eliminate the chances of duplicate content, which might happen if you have a separate mobile site from your desktop site.

Images

Although many people think that copy is the only element of your website that should be optimized, web designers should pay attention to some of the best practices when uploading the images to the web site. First of all, the images should have descriptive, logical file names, because it helps search engines “see” your images and put them into context. It takes time, but it pays off. The second thing web designers should keep in mind is that the file sizes should be as small as possible because large files can slow down page loading time and damage the ranking. The last, but not the least important thing is that in addition to file names, your images should have optimized alt tags. Alt tags help search engines to understand what is being described, and the users can read that description when they run the mouse over the image. Even if the browsers do not support your images, thanks to the alt tags, the users will be able to understand what is being shown.

Conclusion

The relationship between SEO and web design is very complex, but we hope that this article helped you realize how your business can benefit from a functional and visually appealing website. Whether you are starting a small business, or you want to redesign your existing website and be sure that SEO and web design are working together, our West Palm Beach web design team will be there to help you at any time!