When you are on the internet as often as I am, you come across a number of websites straight out of the mid ninety's and some that you know someone just thought one day "I'm going to build my own site". Now Obviously search engines do not look at the "prettiness" of websites otherwise the first page would be filled with fancy flash sites and cookie cutter sites.
The question is how important is web design for your SEO?
When you are building a website, or picking a designer for your website you should make sure that the designer keeps their code clean. What do I mean by this you ask? Well, take the time and look at the code, you want nice clean coding. Do not let them fill your site with font tags and a bunch of java script. This day and age a good webmaster should know that CSS will make your code neat and tidy for the search engines as they crawl through, as well you can often time link your java script from a separate file on your server. Most importantly, do not fill your code with spam. Use your alt tags wisely, do not describe the picture in the code use that in your visible text. Use only viable meta tags, there is a lot of them out there, but they have been devalued and could hurt you more than help you.
The next biggest mistake I find on websites is navigation, or the lack there of. You work really hard to get your site to the first page with great SEO techniques, then you have no one staying on your site because they are having trouble finding their way around your site. When you think of SEO, you think of getting top page results, but they do not call it internet marketing for nothing (marketing being the operative word). Remember you are trying to provide the best product and the best price, but if they can't find their way to that product, all is lost. The importance of navigation as far as SEO goes, is text links. Do not hide your navigation in java, flash or CSS only, be sure you have some text links on your page. I generally add any text links near the bottom of the page especially if you have a top navigation, it allows your visitors a place to go once they reach the bottom.
Last but never least is consistency. Your web page should have a common theme throughout. You want your visitors to recognize your site the whole way through. Web site's are not homes, do not decorate differently on each page. You do not want your visitor thinking they have left your site and then moving on to a competitors site. Another good rule of thumb is when you are adding external links on your site, use the target tag. This allows for the external link to opened in a different window and tab which makes it easier for the potential client to wander back in your direction and hopefully purchase that product or service that you are offering.
Clean, easy to navigate sites will draw in more potential revenue, help you on the search engines with top page results and could even get advertisers to want to be on your site. SEO always starts with design, think ahead and you will save valuable time and money!
Carrie Haggerty has been working in SEO and Internet marketing over the past 3 years. She has started her own
SEO Firm, http://www.cmhwebservices.com. She also has started her own SEO article website strictly for webmasters to submit, and is marketing it the new internet business owners as a resource.
