5 Reasons Why Design Matters To SEO

1. Good design matters to search engines

Over at Search Engine Journal I wrote an article titled SEO Quality Indicators & The Heap Paradox where I basically point out that when evaluating a website, search engines determine the value of a site by adding up “quality indicators.” Quality indicators are signs that your website is a good, strong, well produced source of solid content. The good news is that many quality indicators are related to the design of your site.

For example: a great SEO design will:

1. Minimize code while highlighting content
2. Place the content towards the top of the site’s source code
3. Use html tags and CSS as optimal indicators of your site’s content

2. Good design makes marketing easier

On the Internet, search marketing amounts to getting other sites to mention you on their websites. You do this by building interesting content for other sites to link to. However, website editors are much less likely to link to a site with a poor design, even if that site has great content.

As a marketer of online content, I can tell you without hesitation that the number of one hurdle to promoting your site online is a bad design. A bad design can ruin great services or content.
3. Good design makes branding easier

The holy grail of SEO is to become an authority in your niche. Once you are an authority, you become a link magnet, and your online marketing takes place automatically without much work.

The job of becoming an online authority is made much easier by having a great design that screams quality.
4. Good design gets you noticed by the design community

I didn’t realize this until recently, but one of the largest communities on the Internet is the design community. There are hundreds of design galleries and other sites that highlight great website and blog designs. These end up being free and very valuable links.

As an example, take my site College Crunch which has been featured in the WordPress.org Showcase Gallery as one of the Top Rated sites. This opportunity opened my eyes to the positive effects of having a great site design.
5. Good design lowers your bounce rate

A lot of people don’t know this, but Google and other search engines actually monitor the way visitors interact with your website. If people leave your website moments after first arriving, they are said to have “bounced.” The search engines take this statistic very seriously because if people leave your site quickly, it means they were not happy with the search result. Since search engines want good search results, they move sites with low bounce rates up and sites with high bounce rates down.

Moral of the story: people are more likely to stay at your site and look around if it looks nice. This has a postive effect on your search rankings.