How Your Website Design Effects Your SEO virginiaseo.org /blog/website-design-effects-seo/ Adys Lynn Dill
Design Is 50% Of The Battle In the Moz Blog, Cyrus Shepard mentions in part of his 25 step SEO Master Blueprint that Design is 50% of the Battle. This is only too true and we have seen many well designed sites fail due to a lack of certain SEO elements, and vice versa. Let’s expand on the three ways in which a website or blog can ensure that all aspects of the site are up to par (including the design). A company c an have important information or relevant products for the visitor but if the design fails them, masked in clutter or heavy loading images then they are lost at the door and the rest is null.
A Good Design Can lower bounce rate: BRXQFH 5DWH Is the time spent on a site and it reflects how effectively your brand resonates with your visitors. A high bounce rate is when your visitors leave after one page.
PDJH 6SUHDG Let’s say your visitor views the home page and it is taking too long to load (the majority will leave after 3 seconds), they will more than likely press the back button and go to the next ranked website listed. Let’s face it, with the vast information available on the web and the need for instant access to it, a slow loading page is not worth the visitor’s time if they can simply find it somewhere else. A few factors that impact page loading time are: heavy bearing widgets, third party content and large size images.
NDYLJDWLRQ If the navigation is not clear, confusing, or leads to dead ends the visitor will without hesitation end site navigation and return to the previous search results, especially if the Information they are searching for is not even there- How frustration would that be? Have you ever gone into a site only to discover that it is not even on the topic you were looking for?
SROXWLRQV How can you decrease the load time you ask? You can start by making sure your image sizes are as small as they can be without altering quality. 1. Optimize your JPEGs by using JPEG Mini 2. Optimize your PNGS by using TinyPNG 3. Scale your graphics using a graphics program such as GIMP or Adobe Photoshop. 4. Use thumbnails in blog posts versus full images, and then link the thumbnails to the full sized image. To limit widget weight: The more the widget does, the heavier it is. For example, a twitter widget that displays feed will be low bearing versus a widget that searches keywords and displays people tweeting a hashtag. Another example of a heavy bearing widget is one that pulls a Pinterest board into widget, every time the page load, it will load 15 thumbnails from Pinterest, scripts and iframe’s included.
A Good Design Can