The Importance Of Web Design and SEO

Search engine optimization is of vital importance to web design. Even if someone were to have a wonderfully designed and perfected web design, it won't do any good if no one can find the site. A web designer must remember to keep SEO in mind when designing the website. However, that doesn't mean that the web site owner needs to sacrifice their ideal site design for the sake of search engine optimization. Ideally, it is best to strike a good balance with web design and SEO. There are even techniques that allow one to approach their web design target while still having good SEO, as well. Good web design should have several key aspects to it. The general goals for a website is to attract visitors, impress them, and deliver the websites content. This content can range from information, blogs, products, the reason for creating the website in the first place. An increasingly common design strategy is to use a minimalist design. That is to emphasize the content and purpose of the website and avoid distracting users with anything else. This can work well for a professional site, but it can be a problem for more creative and community oriented sites. Where the distractions are part of the appeal. Now, this optimization comes into play after the site's goals have been laid out. The idea behind SEO is to make it so that search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, and others will be able to direct visitors to the site. This happens when a user searches for a term that is common to the website. The details can be quite involved and change overtime, but a simple word and context match is the foundation. Since, most of search is text oriented an all text website is easier to search and rank in the results. A second method is popularity, people linking to the site will increase its search rating. Occasionally these two factors complement each other, and other times they are in conflict. If there is a lot of text on the site than SEO should be fairly easy. But if someone creates a flash heavy site search engines will have a lot harder parsing the content. This can conflict with SEO. There are advanced HTML, JavaScript, and CSS techniques that can create any design. A good design principal is to use these to create the effects whenever possible, and resort to pictures and flash only when necessary or unimportant.