How does web design influence SEO?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a big part of your businesses success online. Not only does your website need to be well designed, visually attractive, and practical, it also needs to be fully optimised to improve performance on search engines like Google and Bing. But what does this involve for web designers? And how does web design influence SEO? Well, here at Pumpkin Web Design Manchester, we can help with that. We are Manchester’s leading web design experts, and we provide, high quality, effective, web design solutions. We work with a range of local companies and businesses across Manchester, and the surrounding area, including Wigan and Southport. As a result, we have produced this guide to the role of SEO in web design.

So, how exactly can aspects of your web design, influence your SEO strategy? Well, there are several ways that web design can be influential, including:

Navigation and layout- the layout of your website needs to be simple and straightforward for users. But crawl bots from different search engines will also need to navigate your website, from page to page. Any difficulties they encounter, or any broken links, will count against your website in terms of ranking position in the search results. And so you could be demoted to a lower position, because of poor layout and navigation design.
Images and visual content- the images and visual content you use can be optimised to improve website performance. This is a two step process. Firstly, you can compress the images so that they load almost immediately, without losing quality. This will help improve your website loading speed, and is something you should take into account when designing any website. Secondly, you can also complete the alt tag and descriptions with the target keyword. This will hep improve your chances of ranking for the chosen keyword.
headings and structure- when designing the website, you will be spending a lot of time planning the structure of the layout. For the best search results, you will need to be sure that your headings are in the correct order, and that they are not repeated. This is something that will also help your website look more professional too.
Link errors- Crawl bots for different search engines crawl each of your website pages individually. So, if you want your website to rank, you need to use internal linking effectively. This could be through call to action buttons, image sliders or galleries, or just plain text links. But it is something you should include in the web design plan. If any of these links are broken, you can expect your website ranking to suffer.
Responsive design- for your website to perform well online, you should make sure you create a responsive website. This is a website that changes layout or design features, depending on the screen size of the device accessing the website. A mobile device for example, will display a modified version of your website, when compared to the desktop version. And this should give the best possible user experience to all involved. But also, this type of design will help your website perform better in the search rankings.

For more information about web design and navigation, get in touch with the experts today, here at Pumpkin Web Design Manchester. Manchester’s leading web design experts.