How does SEO affect website design?

Search Engine Optimisation is largely to do with the content of a website. It is here that you need to insert keywords, create meta-tags and ensure the right level of density and quality to attract higher rankings. That doesn’t mean, however, that SEO is unrelated to web design. On the contrary, a well-designed website can aid in gaining stronger rankings and every website design needs to be influenced by a working knowledge of SEO.

There are two major ways to drive your website up the rankings aside from populating it with decent regular content. The first is to get back links from other sites. The second is to spend some time focusing on your H1 headings in your web design. Of these your H1 tag is the most important, as it outlines the contents of the page and is what robots will instantly be drawn to when searching through your site. As these robots are looking to match up users with relevant content, the stronger match your H1 tag is, the better your rankings will be.

These H1 tags, combined with H2 and H3 tags also provide a structure to your article, which is highly attractive to robots, for similar reasons of relevancy and clarity.

Designing PDF content into a site should be avoided if you are trying to maximise SEO. Some sites have entire pages, normally in the ‘print’ version that are PDF files. Consequently their content is un-indexed by Google. That’s an awful lot of wasted content. Images can now be indexed via an ‘image search’, but still aren’t really taken into account when Google determines rankings. Therefore, you should never add in an image at the expense of written content or use one as a header.

In the best scenario, an optimised website is a mixture of design and content, working together to provide an attractive and highly ranked website.