Summary: Whilst Google may be limited on what it can ’see’ so far as your website design is concerned, your design definitely has an impact on how well optimised your website is. Here’s how!
How can a pretty website design make a difference to your SEO? Surely Google doesn’t ’see’ your design – and thus doesn’t rank your site better just because it looks good?
Google can ’see’ some elements of your design – for example, if your links or text are a similar colour to the background of your page, this is something Google can detect (and indeed, Google may penalise your site for black hat SEO techniques if you do this!).
Using templates
Google can also ’see’ your style sheet – Google knows the difference between a site built using a template that’s used elsewhere on the web, and a site built from a custom design. In our experience, like for like, Google treats custom designs better. Certainly, there’s no harm in adjusting and renaming your styles to make them custom, to counter this.
Using many images
If your design is image heavy, this potentially could impact your SEO. Google likes fast loading sites – especially following the release of Google Caffeine – as these give the user a better experience (and Google generally likes things that deliver a better user experience). So slow loading sites won’t rank as well, and so, if your images are slowing down your site, you’ll see a negative impact on your rankings. Make sure they’re well optimised and not used excessively.
Using javascript or flash
If your design is created using javascript or flash, there’s a good chance that this will negatively impact your SEO – particularly if the javascript or flash is used for your navigation. Now, we know there are ways around this, but unless you’ve spent a lot of time ensuring that your SEO hasn’t been affected, your rankings may suffer – simply, Google struggles to read elements written this way and so may not find all of your pages.
Javascript and flash elements can also slow down your site, having a further negative impact as explained above.
Using inefficient mark up
If your design uses poor mark up techniques, this may impact your SEO. There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, Google needs to be able to find your content so anything that gets in the way there will mean your rankings suffer. Secondly, Google pays more attention to content early on in the page. So if you’re using 700 break returns to space out your content, if you’re still stuck making things with tables, or if you’re using inline styling (putting CSS on your page rather than in style sheets) you can be sure that the later content of the page will be treated as of less importance. And, as that’s likely to be the content that has all the juicy stuff (after Google’s done with spidering all your meta tags, header and menus, and so on), you’re going to suffer.
Linkworthy sites
Finally, but perhaps most importantly, sites that look good attract more links. You need links from good quality sites (preferably with good anchor text, e.g. ‘SEO services’ rather than ‘Angel’) because this tells Google that your site is relevant, useful and trustworthy too. Sites that don’t look good won’t get that many links (and as Rand Fishkin commented in a recent video with Angel SEO, this is one of the big problems with using a content management system like Wordpress – the sites simply don’t look linkworthy, unless you hack them to pieces – in which case, you might as well start from scratch).
Enjoyed this article?
Subscribe to our RSS feed, follow us on Twitter or just simply recommend it.
Further Discussion
Leave a Response
Make sure you enter the * required information where indicated. Responses are moderated so please no link dropping, no keywords or domains as names; do not spam, and do not advertise!