SEO Website Design Impact
Getting your clients to understand the impact of small business web design on SEO can be a challenge particularly for those who equate flashy web pages with high quality development.
While aesthetics are still vital in small business web design, it should not get in the way of search engine spiders who view websites differently from humans.
Keywords and tags: Search bots view and index keywords and text data found in various tags of a website’s source code. A flashy and animated landing or home page frequently contains heavy graphics and hardly any text for the search spider to view, causing the search spider to leave your website without indexing its contents.
Slow loading time: Page load time is a factor in search rankings. Slow load times not only lower rankings but turn away Internet users. Sophisticated graphics may be attractive but should not be implemented at the expense of SEO. Visual effects tend to contain large amounts of data making them ‘heavy’, causing delays in loading the intro page for your viewer.
Most graphically heavy intro pages often allow a user to skip the page to go to the home page. Studies on Internet consumer behaviour, however, suggest that Internet users abandon a website that does not load quickly and no longer waits for the graphics page to lead to the home page.
Navigability: Your website’s structure and layout should enable its users to find their way around your website easily. This is why a minimalist web design for SEO is highly favored over one that is complex and cluttered.
Navigability also entails creating an XML or HTML sitemap which makes it easy for search spiders to view your website’s contents. Add a link to your sitemap at the header or at the footer of every web page.
Video content: Instead of creating a “splashy” page with heavy graphics, an alternative would be to add video content which search engines like Google love. Generate a video sitemap as well which you can submit to major search engines for easy indexing.
Avoid page redirection: “Splashy” or intro pages with heavy graphics often redirect users to the home page after viewing or skipping the intro. The goal of search engines is to point its users directly to what they are looking for so if a search crawler detects a redirection of your base URL, your website’s search rankings may be adversely affected.
Small business web design for SEO must strike a good balance between visual appeal and search engine friendliness. Your website’s design should be attractive to its intended audience and search engines for it to rank well.
If you need help with your website SEO just ask.
