Mar
What Impact Does Great Web Design and Coding Have on SEO?
This is a guest blog post from Wes Towers, a loyal reader of the I Do Web Marketing blog who operates Omnific Design.
As a trained graphic designer who moved into web design in 2000, I known our clients in both fields are looking for the same result. They want a design that is not only attractive but engaging and functional especially when it comes to website design. The reason is obvious, an appealing website catches the eye, sustains attention and causes a response. I want to be extremely clear here, beauty is not the only aspect of good web design. If you want a great web design, you must consider usability, structure and accessibility.
Proper coding should be a given, in any website. Sadly, most website coding I look at is riddled with errors which would be hurting not only the way the site displays in some browsers but it would also be having a massive impact on the search engine optimisation.
Code Semantics… Huh… How can that help?
Now for a little techy stuff. If you are not a coder, stick with me on this. You should be able to pick up enough info here to ensure your website coder knows what he is doing.
Make sure you use proper code semantics within your website. One of the best things about using semantic code is it performs well when it comes to search engines. When search engine spiders crawl your web pages, they don’t look at it like humans do. They rely on the code, text and formatting to understand what is important within a web page. Give them what they want and structure you code right. These spiders do their best to learn more about your site through the tags contained in the codes. For example, you MUST use header tags <h1> and <h2> so the search engines understand these are heading and can easily identify what the page is about based on words used in headings.
Semantics are also responsible for the accessibility of your website. If you follow the basic principles of code semantics as well as accessibility, you will be able to structure your content so humans and search engines can both understand your content. You should consider people with special needs when having a website coded. For example, there are speech browsers for the blind and the Alt tags for images are incredibly important here.
In a nut-shell, code semantics allow you to have cleaner code. This means your download time will be faster because the size of your page files will be smaller. If you are a web designer who is not dependent on WYSIWYG programs for web design, then using semantics for your coding is the best recourse for you when it comes to updating and editing your website.
Graphic Design Melbourne specialist, Wes Towers invites you to learn more about marketing, branding, graphic design and web design and how they can help in your business. Check out www.omnificdesign.com.au for more resources and free ebooks.
Justin McGill is a web marketing professional and runs a successful Small Business SEO Firm. He is the founder and CEO of SEORCHERS (read: [surch-ers]) - a local web marketing firm specializing in organic search engine optimization (SEO) with a focus on converting visitors into clients. He is available for SEO Consulting and now you can connect with him on Google+!.Related posts:
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Thanks for posting my guest article, Justin. Greatly appreciate it.
- Wes -
Any time Wes, it was a good read!
This is a very nice tutorial..!!!
thnx for writing it.,.!!
Good post but more and more people are using CMS system and in many cases they cannot effect coding. They cannot do anything with H tags or how the code is compiled and for an average Joe it is impossible to say if this or the other CMS has good coding or not.
The great post and nice describe to the friendly web design coding for SEO. Thanks for the great contribution for your post.
I like use the wordpress for seo,thanks for you.
Good article. This is a really a important subject. As you mention, people can have various disables which can lead to that they are not able to see the web page as “normal” people can. So to have your images up taged with a “alt”-atribute is important so example blind people at least can here what it is for type of picture.
Oh wow, great article right on point! Web design is so vital to the SEO because it basically puts the cherry on top for the SEO. Solid article, bookmarked!!
Hey Wes, great article. I recently just brought a client on and we are going to be doing a complete site redesign for the reasons you mentioned.
I am going to put it on a dedicated and scalable server as well has have the coder squeeze every last ounce of speed out of the site.
Of course a new clean and fresh look isn’t such a bad by product of getting the site blazing fast.
Anyone that is remotely serious about an online business needs to invest a few hundred a month in their site infrastructure. Skimping will definitely be more expensive in lost revenue in my opinion.
In planning a website one of the things that should be taken in consideration is how your web design coding will affect SEO. A lousy web design can greatly affect your seo campaign. Accessibility and simplicity are very important in web designing.
Thank for this wonderful information, I a firm believer that great web design and good coding must go hand in hand. It’s rare to find great web design with poor coding semantics.
By following the suggestion given on this post, it means that you add value to your site. Have great design and coding means your website has high quality and many visitors will comeback.