Every day, new websites start to live on the web. Their number can already be counted in hundreds of thousands of millions … Therefore, it is not surprising that it is increasingly difficult to stand out among the competition, both in terms of the content or appearance of the page, as well as the position in the search engine. It’s important to remember that an attractive website design is not always enough to attract the attention of potential customers, and many factors influence the positioning itself. To strengthen the brand’s presence on the Internet, cooperation is also needed on the line: web design and SEO.
Web design, or what is web design?
Web design is a series of activities consisting in the layout, design and implementation of websites. Therefore, it is a comprehensive activity that allows you to create a complete website and its “launch” on the web. In his work, the web designer must consider first of all such issues as: navigation on the website, its interactivity, practicality and what information will be on the site. All elements of the page should interact with each other and be interesting for the recipient.
Why is web design important?
You have certainly heard that the appearance and design of websites is very important and it is worth taking care of it. But can you answer the question why? In a study entitled Trust and Mistrust of Online Health Sites, users were asked what elements of the site and content affected their trust in the health site. When they talked about why some page seemed unbelievable, 94% of the responses referred to web design elements. Although the study concerned health websites, the results can be transferred to other industries. Users in the case of not trusting web sites among the elements influencing such an opinion most often mentioned:
- heavy templates
- pop-up ads
- too small, invisible font
- boring design, no color
- slow intros, long page loading time.
When asked why they trusted individual websites, users indicated 83% of the reason for the content on the site. This simple example shows that web design is extremely important and if poorly done, it can cause low traffic to your site.
Website design – think it over!
Even if you entrust the design of your website to specialists, you can not forget about what you want the site to be. Completely different approaches and design will require e-commerce websites, extensive company websites and information pages. If your site is to work efficiently, defining the purpose of its operation is crucial. It is worth asking yourself what your main business is and think about the whole web design.
Web design and SEO – what connects them?
Both the SEO specialist and the web designer have a common goal: work on the visibility of the site. The web designer makes sure that the page he creates is useful, meets the needs of users, is attractive, attracts attention. The SEO specialist is asking for the same in his job. He makes sure that the page is visible in the search engine, however, the basis of his work is an algorithm, which, unlike the website, can not be seen with the naked eye.
They both have to deal with Google’s robots. It would seem that the best friend should be an SEO specialist with them. Right, but not only. The SEO specialist makes sure that the website information collected by the robots is correct and in accordance with Google’s guidelines. As you know, however, not only technical elements are important in the positioning of pages. This is where the work of web designers and web design begins. When creating a website, they must remember that quality is also of great importance to Google.
The structure of the site is another element of a shared SEO mission and web design. Just as users scan content on the site to find the information they are interested in, robots scan the content of the page to understand it. Google’s robots, like impatient users, “read” only the text marked with the attributes <title>,<h1>, <h2> . Typography and the hierarchy of headers are also important for web designer.
The user experience can also be added to the already mentioned elements. An example of this is the navigation of the page. It’s just as important to users as Google’s robots. If it is incorrect or the internal linking scheme is incorrect, the crawlers will not crawl some sub-pages or Google will impose a penalty for the poor link structure.
One of the ongoing trends in the design of web pages is minimalism, which also has a significant impact on the positioning of websites. In this case, less is more. Minimalism here means the least possible and at the same time the best optimized elements, thanks to which the website will load faster, which is important for SEO as well as for the end user.
After all, one of the most important common issues of web design and SEO is the bounce rate. If the site is exaggerated, non-intuitive and has poor navigation, we can be sure that the bounce rate will be high. This in turn is a signal for the robots that the page is not useful, so its position will also be lower.
If you take care of the above-mentioned elements while designing the site, your site will satisfy both users and the search engine. Regardless of whether at work you think like a web designer – about the recipient as a human, or like an SEO specialist – about the algorithm, you have to remember that every detail matters.
Picture Credit: CyberRabbit