Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and your web design actually work side-by-side and knowing the importance of proper web design is important to make sure that your SEO plan works. They are like yin and yang in a way. Here are some ways SEO and web design go together.

How is web design related to SEO?

1. MOBILE-ity

Making your website design mobile-friendly would pull in more engagement in your website since a lot of people use mobile devices and a lot of website traffic comes from phones. If your website works on mobiles, giving them the same experience they would when they use your website on a desktop, then it helps rank you higher in the search engine rankings.

2. Speed

Sometimes the speed of your website would depend on how you designed your website. If people notice that your website is loading too slow, then they would bounce quickly and visit another site that loads so much faster. The speed of your page would affect your ranking.

3. Trust

First impressions are important, and people are so easy to form their opinions. One look at your website, they would immediately know whether they want to move further and explore or leave and just go to another site. Making your website look pleasing to the eyes, effective, and interesting would lure them in further to explore and engage. 

4. Design

When you are designing your website, you have to make sure that everything would be easier to read since if the people who are visiting your site can’t read anything, then they would click out of your website and visit another.

5. Sitemaps

Sitemaps are there to provide a guide of your whole website so this would make it easier for search engines to decipher which part of your website is the most important thing for them to promote.

Should Web designers know SEO?

Web designers have to know Search Engine Optimization since this would help them make their design more effective and implement changes that would actually work in bringing in more site traffic on the website that they are designing.

How to integrate SEO into a website?

1. Quality Content

• Take advantage of your heading

Usually, people would get attracted to read your article when they think that your headline is interesting, so when they see that your heading somehow tells a story in a way, they would be able to follow through your article easier and pull in their interest.

• Authentic content

When you are planning on putting out content, you have to make sure that the content you put up is unique and well-informed so that search engines would want to promote your content and give you a leg up on the ranking.

• Being specific

When you have pictures, you could add some captions to further explain what is happening in the picture. This would be great, especially if the image does not load for some reason. 

• Clarity

To ensure that your viewers would want to read further, you have to make sure that what they are reading is clear. You could put in keywords that would not sound like you are purposefully adding the keyword there in random places.

2. Keywords

• Be descriptive

Your website name and your tagline are something people could search for. So being descriptive on these parts of your site would help people find you especially if you don’t have any of your keywords on there.

• Add in keywords naturally

Putting in keywords your content would help search engines find your article, but when you are putting your keywords in your content, you have to make sure that it sounds right and not make it sound forced.

3. Links

• Internal linking

Internal linking means that you add links going to more of your content in an article or content that you also have. Adding this would help the reader find more content from you. You could add your internal links through anchor texts.

• Permalinks

There are a few apps that would help you generate customized permalinks. When you customize these links, then it would make people who are interested in looking more into you, actually find you.

• External linking

External links are links that are found on another website that would lead to yours. There are 2 kinds of external linking, the inbound link, and the outbound link. Inbound links are found on another website that leads to you. Outbound links are links found on your website that would lead to another website.

Does changing website design affect SEO?

When you are changing the design of your website, usually it would include changing codes and altering pages. If this is not done properly then it could negatively affect the SEO of your website. But if you are doing everything correctly then it would boost your Search Engine Optimization.