Does Web Design Affect SEO?
Writing by Nick Stamoulis
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Does your web design influence your search engine optimization? If you selected a different or custom web design, could you rank better?
These are good questions and require a little bit of analysis to arrive at the right answer. First, consider the different types of website designs available:
Personally, I think an originally designed website is always best, but not necessarily from an SEO perspective. After all, your web designer may design great sites that do a horrible job at on site optimization.
Nevertheless, if you can swing an original design, for branding purposes, that’s a big plus. But what are the issues you need to look out for from an SEO perspective?
- Code Bloat – This can happen with an original design or template. Does your site’s design incorporate too much code? If so it could hurt your rankings. Keep your code lean and mean.
Permalink Structure – CMS systems like to rely on dynamic permalink structures that somehow don’t do well for SEO. If you can influence those to a more SEO-palatable structure then you’ll fare a lot better in the search engines.
CSS Blues – Sometimes your CSS files can work against you. You could have too many or the ones you have just may not be well optimized. Keep them lean and don’t rely too much on extemporaneous code.
Javascript – Cut it out. Not too much. It can’t be crawled.
Internal Navigation – This one gets a lot of webmasters. Make sure your internal navigation menu is crawlable and that your pages get indexed.
Tables – Tables have their place, but it’s an old way off doing things. Get up to date and don’t build a site with too many tables. When possible, use CSS, but keep it light.
Your web design will be judged by your human visitors, but the search engines judge it too. Make sure you keep it light and that all things work for the good of your site’s rankings.
16 Responses to “Does Web Design Affect SEO?”
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how i wish i could tell these things to the designer in my workplace. For all the full of table designs which are doubly full of images. Makes life hell for SE optimizer like me.
Hi kittu k, Thanks for reading…Hang in there, feel free to even pass along this over to them
I haven’t seen too many worthwhile posts on CSS optimization, would like to learn more of your perspective on this.
Web designer and SEO practicionners should learn a bit of html/css to avoid lots of those things that you mention. The basic stuff for us but how many site can do this correctly these days? Still lots of work to do for us
cheers, Samuel
Hi David, Sure, I will consider writing a post on this in the future…
Hi Samuel, Thanks for your comment…there is lots of work for us all to do
messy code in the webpage create havoc for seo as it affects the text code ratio, so good design leads to good site optimization.
Nice post – I wrote something the other day about SEO for designers, specifically looking at how layout/design elements might affect rankings – see what you think!
http://www.twentysixsearch.com/blog/seo-for-designers/
Hi Jono – Thanks for stopping by and highlighting the blog post you wrote about this topic…excellent analysis!
Nice info! I’ve done some independent research on this and found a strong link between engine listing rank and code to content ratio. I recommend keeping the amount of coding down and the amount of content up on every webpage
Hi Warren – Great point code to content ratio is important, but I always recommend creating well developed content that has a purpose and accomplishes the goals of the website (not just content for the sake of content)…thanks for reading!
All good valid points Nick! When I design a site, I always ensure I include plenty of internal links because this is often overlooked.
I also think one point that is skipped over is the lack of use of images and optimising those – adding good alt tags, strong visual affordance, well named… these are all things that get missed on a regular basis – sadly!
I would like to add a couple of points here to the nice post you’ve published:
1) “Easy Navigation” with proper hierarchy, meaning more important content needs to be closer to the root, homepage. It’s better for a site not to be deeper than 4 layers. Also, the main menu of the site should be easily visible providing the main sections of the site accessible from anywhere at the site.
2) “Enhanced Linking Structure” enriched with the top keywords of the site directing to the top landing pages. Such links are to be made using a technology understandable by search engines not Java Script, flash, etc.
Altogether, with the above two points the presence of keywords are more felt by both site visitors and search engines.
Good post Nick….its a complex subject on which many pages could be written. First, I think the term “web design” misleads many folks, I refer to “creative site design” and “site design/structure” to seperate the two distinct topics. Second, it is amazing to me how many folks still don’t understand that “site structure drives SEO” and that an automated tool is needed to manage/replicate/update site content. Third, building your own site from scratch today makes it hard to keep up with all the web marketing chagnes and buying a “template” while more affordable, is restrictive and limiting. The way forward I think is to look at the second generation, fully customizable web platforms out there that handle everything from SEO to social marketing in an integrated fashion. They are robust tools to custom design your site and include multi-site and multi-country/language capabilities, the full range of every changing site functionality, security, integration with back-end fulfillment systems and other third parties, etc.
Hi Andy,
Very true about image work when it comes to on site optimization!
Hi Terry,
Excellent points and I do like the “creative site design” term as well! Thanks for the comment!
Good topic Nick. Here are some additional thoughts on the topic:
1. According to Matt Cutts, using tables instead of CSS has no impact on how your site is crawled and indexed (at least by Google). So while tables are considered old-school, they aren’t penalized and are still very useful in certain instances. But I agree that all design elements should be used sparingly (less is more).
2. According to Matt Cutts, Google can now crawl and interpret Javascript links and a lot of Javascript code itself. In fact, they are getting quite sophisticated at doing so. (See Matt Cutts’ videos on YouTube for an example…it’s pretty amazing!) However, I agree with you to not risk putting important content in Javascript in the event Google (and other search engines) have trouble crawling it since they currently can’t interpret all Javascript code. I guess a good rule would be to make things as easy for the search engines as possible, despite how sophisticated the engines are becoming. Therefore, include your content on your pages as text in HTML tags.
3. Google always says, “if you design your website with your users in mind, then that will take care of most SEO issues.” I have to disagree with Google on this point because they contradict themselves when they say they can’t crawl Flash websites, images, videos, etc. These multimedia elements make websites much more interesting and engaging for users, but they are a black hole to search engines. I can understand why Google can’t crawl these elements, but then they shouldn’t be giving people the direction they do. I guess the take-away is to write the content of the website with users in mind, but design the structure and elements of your website with the search engines in mind.
4. According to Matt Cutts, code bloat is no longer an issue for Google. They used to only crawl the first 100k of a page, but with their upgraded systems they will crawl your entire page (within reason). So even if you have relevant content at the bottom of your page preceded by tons of extraneous code, Google will still crawl and index that content. But I agree with you that making life easier for search engines is better, and eliminating any unnecessary code is a good idea.
5. Your points about internal links and hard-coded links is valid. Matt Cutts made a point to webmasters to ensure their internal linking structure is robust. Along those lines, Matt also said that links in the content of your page are given more weight by Google than navigational links in menus and footers that appear on every page and aren’t surrounded by relevant content. So if you have a page you definitely want Google to index, be sure to link to it in your content and don’t just rely on your navigational link structure.
I hope this helps…keep up the good work Nick.
Hi MasterLinker,
Thanks for providing additional thoughts for our readers! Excellent points all around!
Take Care,
Nick