Should SEO be considered when creating a web design?
A web design has many aspects to it and one of them should be SEO or search engine optimisation. SEO is the process of optimising a website to rank well on the search engines for specific keywords and phrases. SEO is considered to be a separate service to web design and it can be utilised to increase the rankings of already established websites. However, part of SEO is very much related the web design, website structure and the code behind the site.
SEO is not required for all web design projects as it may not be a priority for your business. You may rely on other methods of generating sales leads. Thats not to say if you get a website designed it shouldn’t be built using search engine friendly techniques. The basic principles of web design involve creating search engine friendly navigation, page structure and code.
The search engines have some pretty advanced technology that is able to crawl through the internet and rank websites based on their content and how a search term relates to that content. Search engines update their algorithms quite often which means search engine optimisers and web designers need to constantly adjust their SEO techniques.
The programs that crawl the internet are referred to as spiders or robots, I prefer to call them spiders. These spiders crawl over all the code behind the websites and rank the website on a number of factors. The cleaner the website code and the better the web design is structured makes it more crawlable.This is where the term comes from ’search engine friendly’.
The way a website is designed is only a small part of SEO but it definitly contributes to the overall search engine rankings. If you are getting a website designed make sure you ask your web designer to consider SEO and building a search engine friendly website.
