SEO Web Design - The Two Disciplines Go Hand In Hand

If you are in the process of re-designing your website, or you are a website designer, SEO should always remain in the front of your mind as a vital part of the process. Too often designers and SEO experts clash, when in reality the two disciplines should always go hand in hand - and SEO and web design should be talked about in the same breath, from the beginning of a development.

SEO web design is basically just good website design - after all, if you build the most 'wow' site in the world but nobody can find it short of remembering and typing the URL in, what's the point of that?

What Makes Good SEO Web Design?

Steer clear of the splash page containing a huge banner image and a 'click here to enter' - this is becoming less common in website design and thankfully so, as they pretty much block website spiders. A site's homepage will be the most frequently indexed page usually and if it's a 'fancy' splash page, they won't find your internal pages either as the linking structure won't be in place.

Too much image and flash content throughout does not make for good SEO web design, as search engines generally can't read this content - and if keywords are used within images and flash, this is a real problem. Same goes for ajax content - if a web designer implements a considerable amount of ajax, particularly for navigation, yes it leads to a more seamless experience but because it is loaded dynamically it is not searchable via the search engines.

There are other numerous basic but key elements excellent SEO web design comprises of, and should be in place from the get-go - using well thought through content and keywords, alt tags for all images, and fundamentally well-written code, amongst others. Additionally, every page should have a unique title tag to make clear to the search engines that each page contains different content.

A Long-Term Relationship

A well-designed website will improve the user experience and in turn the sites credibility - from the day it launches it will work harder to get further up the rankings. If you are a website designer who knows the fundamentals of SEO or a search professional who knows a good website when they see one, this will broaden your service offering to clients.

SEO web design, put simply, takes into account the medium - the internet. Designers may grumble at SEO restrictions, but they wouldn't design a glossy, printed brochure with the pages stuck together and a badly designed website hidden away on page 8 of Google pretty much amounts to the same. SEO professionals and web designers must admit they are in an important relationship, and they are in it for the long haul.