Good Website Design and SEO are not Mutually Exclusive

July 29, 2010 by +Marj Wyatt
Filed under Featured, SEO Strategies

Website design is a process of function and aesthetics. I’ve just completed a project where the desires of the graphic designer took precedence over search engine optimization and website performance. I had only heard about these sorts of debates before and had never been involved in one.

The designer admitted they cared more about look and feel of the site than they did about its features and functions. Ultimately being forced to defer to the graphic designer’s logic by putting a scroll box into a post, for the sake of aesthetics, enforced website design tactics that have not been popular since the late 1990’s. Neither the project initiator nor the graphic designer seemed to care at all about search engine visibility, website performance, or the impact their design-based decisions were having upon the website design functionality or the user experience. Regardless of my feelings about it, I did as I was instructed and delivered a site that has absolutely no SEO value, much to my chagrin. I contributed my ideas and they were ignored. What else was there for me to do?

But, my position stands firm that graphic designer opinions should NEVER take precedence over website design performance, function, and search engine optimization. I will augment this by saying that website design aesthetics and website functionality are not mutually exclusive goals. With a little bit of understanding, beautiful graphic designs can be rendered to highly functional code that performs well and is also optimized for search engine visibility.

In my experience, graphics designers rarely have website design development or SEO skills. I have the distinction of possessing wordpress website design, development and SEO skills, among other things, so this is not true of me. My composite skill set is extremely rare, so I have been told. Because it is important to my clients, I keep abreast of current online marketing tactics and website design and development trends so I can educate my customers and offer choices, should the need arise. Of primary concern to me is overall website SEO and performance. A properly designed website can garner organic traffic, especially if it uses the built-in features of a content management system like WordPress, and performance does not have to suffer if the developer knows what they are doing.

With the caveat that there are many people out there who know as much or more about this topic than me, I will share a little of what I know about these things in this post. It is not all inclusive, for it would be impossible to encapsulate years of experience on such large subjects into a single post.

Why Should You Care about SEO?

A pretty website design pleases the eye, and aesthetics do matter, but your website SEO strategy can make the difference between a profitable website and a wasted expense. If you are not doing your own development work, you have paid a professional website design developer real money in exchange for their time. Viewing your website as a marketing asset should not be taken lightly. With good planning, design, and a solid SEO strategy in mind from the onset, your website can become an extremely valuable tool that facilitates your business success.

Search Engine Optimization is not a huge mystery. There are several sites with valuable and free content out there for people to study, if they are willing to invest the time and energy. While each SEO “expert” seems to subscribe to their own philosophy, seach engine algorithms are based on math some factors are constants.

Generally speaking, there is on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-Page SEO is what you do with your website design and post content. Off-Page SEO can be loosely defined as the linking strategies you employ to elevate your site’s authority on the internet. Both are important, but the latter has very little to do with website design.

On Page SEO

Each page of your website is viewed individually by search engines. Thus, it is possible for some of your pages to have a more elevated listing status in the search engines than others. Content management systems, like WordPress, offer really cool SEO features like internal linking and frequent updates through RSS feeds and commenting features. As a website design consultant, one of my functions is to help my clients choose rich keyword terms for categories. While some Graphic Designers hold steadfastly to their belief that there still is a place for straight HTML websites, open source applications like WordPress, which is continually improving, make that belief all but obsolete.

Within a page, search engines are alerted by text styling tactics of using headings (H1 is best) or bold text to call attention to important content that contains the keywords you are pursuing. Enabling WordPress plugins that permit you to specify relevant meta titles, descriptions, and post-specific keywords will assist with acquiring organic traffic and gaining better page listings and rankings. Since I put up my first WordPress Website Design years ago, I’ve been using the All in One SEO plugin, although there are others out there.

Having a keyword rich domain name and page title goes miles toward a quick ranking. Post titles and overall URL length matter. The last time that I checked, search engines only read the first 256 characters of a URL. This could have changed, so don’t quote me. So, if you have a long domain name and a long page/post title, your effort in researching and placing keywords could be pointless. WordPress setup defaults are not the best for creating links. There are multiple opinions about what is the best way to customize the permalink structure. In any case, finding ways to eliminate unimportant words and numbers from the link is the only way to go.

Off Page SEO

This is, in a nutshell, your linking strategy. Over the years that I’ve been involved with website delivery, I’ve seen hundreds of offers for SEO automation tools that claim they can drive floods of traffic to your site by exploiting loopholes in search engine algorithms. I’ve never taken that bait. As for other tools that offer SEO link building assistance that is white hat, I’m skeptical that these products have delivered the results promised but I do confess to not having tried more than a handful of them. In my humble opinion, high quality external links are earned through the time-consuming work of posting articles, providing high-quality responses in active forums, and building an online reputation for your site’s authority by offering sincere and relevant blog comments or appearing as a guest blogger on a high ranking site.

Freelancers offer SEO services of link building through article creation, blog commenting and forum posts. I cannot compete with offshore service provider pricing so this is not a service that I offer. I educate my customers on link building tactics and sometimes refer work out to colleagues. There are article spinning tools that allow you to write one good article and spin it multiple ways so you can have unique content up on multiple sites. As for automating blog comments, I don’t approve spam comments on my sites so why should I expect anyone else to do so? Forums may seem like old news but there are some very busy forums with high authority on which I’ve been actively pursuing links back to a few of my sites. Just ensure that you become active in a forum that is related to the main topic of your site if you choose this tactic for link building.

Website Design Performance Notes

If you are using images on your site, upload and reference them with keyword rich names. Embedding keywords as alt text for your images is a important too because search engines can read it. More and more frequently, websites are being found through image searches. Although it makes a site or post more interesting, excessive use of images is discouraged because each call for that image results in another http request which can inhibit performance.

Pages that are designed entirely in flash are … well, flashy. I truly admire the skills that flash programmers have honed but I have never recommended flash introductions when text and images will deliver the same message. Opinions may vary but mine is that flash intros and pages are not good for SEO. Additionally, flash is a client-side application that relies on the technology configuration of the viewer’s computer. Most non-technical people are not as fastidious about PC maintenance and technology upgrades as I may be and no website design expert can write code to overcome that. Hire the flash developer, by all means, but keep in mind that your multi-thousand dollar investment for flash programming may be lost on a portion of your potential audience who is frustrated by the fact that they see nothing on the page or it is taking too long to load.

When moving a site from HTML to a content management system, I frequently hear my clients say that the site seems slower. That’s true. It is, by comparison. This has to do with PHP and database access speeds. Website design architecture and code that works as optimally as possible is my responsibility, so I’m not abdicating entirely. Recently, when this protest kept coming up, I set up the same site on two other hosting services so they could compare site performance. It was a proverbial “no brainer” decision. Their hosting service was the stumbling block. Both A2 Hosting and JustHost eclipsed Network Solutions for page loads and video performance.

The use of CSS sprites improve website design performance because only one image is referenced. I do not advocate for the use of image-based menus, however, because their use removes text from the pages and eliminates dynamic addition of navigation links. This is best explained by example. One of the features of WordPress is that it automatically adds new category links to menus without having to alter site code. This translates to ease of use for my customers, once they’ve gotten a handle on the difference between pages, posts and categories. With the exception of the site that I was recently asked to develop, all of my site navigation code has been pure CSS, clean and simple. After working with a beautiful theme that used one image for all of its iconography and backgrounds, my custom theme designs will be making much more use of CSS sprites.

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Tags: Business Basics, How to Market and Brand, How To Market Yourself, Internet Marketing, Website Testing, WordPress Website Development

Comments

4 Responses to “Good Website Design and SEO are not Mutually Exclusive”

saha says:

January 18, 2011 at 3:58 am

I agree with you. Design should not be prioritized over SEO

Reply
- Marj Wyatt says:
  
  January 18, 2011 at 9:59 am
  
  Thanks for your agreement and your comment. I sort of cringe, these days, when I get a new client who has a long-term relationship with a graphic designer.
  
  I just wrapped up another project where this was the case. They had a WordPress website when they came to me but, due to the graphic layout recommended by the designer, the features of WordPress were totally unusable. In this instance, the site owner understood what I was saying and why it was important I got to fix it!
  
  Reply