Your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) can be influenced by many things, but the one you have the most control over is your websites design. If you can make your website more search engine friendly then your website will rise through the search engine results pages (SERPs), and more search engine users will visit your website. Here are three ways in which your web design may affect your SEO. The first is a bad element you need to remove, the second is a good element you need to add, and the third is an element that is needed if you do not want to lose web traffic.
English: The three biggest web search engines (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
1 – The use of Flash or JavaScript
If you program parts or all of your website via either of these two methods, you are going to have a hard time rising up the search engine results pages. The search engines cannot read this type of web page coding.
If your pages are constructed completely with JavaScript or Flash, then the search engines are going to have a very hard time indexing any of your website. If parts of your website are made from HTML then the search engines will be forced to index your website from the snippets of information they can glean from those bits, which may skew the way the website is interpreted by the search engine.
Flash and JavaScript elements may slow down your websites loading time, which has negative SEO implications. If you remove the JavaScript from your site, and only use Flash for videos, then you will eventually rank higher than the websites that still use JavaScript and Flash; thereby helping you to steal their traffic.
2 – Add a footer link to every webpage
As part of the design process you should include a footer on every page of your website. This footer should contain internal and external links. They should link to other related pages on the site, and the bigger pages such as the “Contact Us” page and “Home Page.” You should place any external links in here too so that they are out of the way. A link footer section makes your website easier to navigate. It makes your website more usable, and will help to stop people leaving your website in frustration.
Doing this will increase your websites SEO value, since a well internally linked website will rank higher than a website that has poor internal linking. It also means you can mirror any graphical, JavaScript or Flash links in your web content. Few people use textual anchor text in their main web content because it does not look nice, so they use a graphical, JavaScript or Flash link (anchor). Sadly, this has a very poor SEO value, so you can make the same link but with text in on the bottom of the page where it still looks nice.
3 – Fast website loading times
The amount of time it takes your website to render (appear after being clicked on) is vital to your websites usability. If it takes longer than three seconds, you are going to lose a lot of viewers.
The amount of time between the page render and it finishing loading is going to affect your SEO. An 8MB heavy page will take almost four seconds. This is roughly within tolerance range. If your page is taking five or more seconds to load then it will not rise very quickly through the SERPs.
Lower the weight of your web page by removing or shrinking images and graphical elements. Cut unnecessary animations and features if they do not add directly to your websites usability.
