How important is website design structure to your SEO?
In many of our blogs that we have written in the past there has been lots of different tips and advice on ways to tweak your website to improve your on-page SEO. These tips normally consisted of changes to the <title> tag, the web content, images, and meta data. Now what we are going to look at is what you can do when your building your new website from scratch and how important is the actual structure and layout of your website to the search engine optimisation of the website as a whole.
Structure is an extremely important part of SEO, however it is not often paid much attention to in terms of SEO and this is often where a lot of web designers go wrong. The website can have the best content in terms of getting in your keywords and relevancy to the page topic but if Google can’t read this content then it is all done for nothing.
Thing about your design as containing several parts, for example, take the top navigation bar or side navigation bar and clearly separate this from other content so that Google is able to identify this as the navigation section. Next have your header area where you may want to have some rich media content to make the site look nice. If you do decide to do this, make sure that any text that is wrapped in amongst it is readable by the search engine and isn’t hidden within a Flash object. A great way to do this is with either a JavaScript or HTML5 image/text slider, and with the new capabilities that the HTML5 standard has brought, it can also add a nice aesthetic appeal to the page.
Now for the main section of the page. This is where you want to get in some of your important text keywords and a bit about the website. For example, we have the following on our homepage: ‘Wow Internet offers web design and search engine optimisation from Birmingham and Manchester as well as SEO conversion services.’ Try not to just keyword stuff in this area though as it will only be detrimental to your SEO and try to focus on getting across what your website is about.
The footer section of the website is a good place to put in any feeds that you have, so you can place your RSS feed, Twitter feed, Blog, Facebook, etc. By doing this it will increase the internal links within your website, make it easier to navigate, and have more fresh content related to you flowing through the site.
It is also very important to make sure that you keep a consistency in information amongst the different sections and make sure you follow your set theme throughout, i.e. don’t talk about how you are a web design firm in the main body and then talk about what’s going on in the sport headlines in your footer!
You will be surprised what a difference this can make towards your search engine optimisation and not only that but it enables users to find exactly what they are looking for much quicker and easier. Keep this in mind if you are in the design process and you will have a solid foundation to build upon.
