Baton Rouge Website Design

A lot of people do not realize that website design is important in improving a website’s search engine optimization ranking. If the design is bad, then people won’t come back or recommend the site to their friends which results in less traffic.

Website design does not only refer to the colors, font or graphics that you use on your site. It also covers your site features, such as video posting, and how you organize content and site features. Basically, how easy users can navigate the site depends on how the website is designed.

When designing a website, there are three main considerations to look at and these are usability, coding, and ethics.

Usability
Don’t design for search engines, design for the visitors of the website. Keep it simple and easy to use. If it’s hard to get to the actual information the visitor is looking for, chances are that person will simply leave and forget about the site thus affecting the search engine optimization ranking.

It is always better to use the basic outline of a site rather than trying to be too innovative with the design. What this means is that you place the main menu on top and links to important pages of the site in the footer. This is better because people are used to looking for the menu at the top and not somewhere within the body or in the sidebars.

Also, keep the site clean and nice to look at. Avoid using too much flashy images or strong colours.

All of these tips are catered for the visitor. If a visitor likes it, then search engines will like it too. Always keep in mind that you should design for people and not crawlers to improve search engine optimization ranking.

Coding
The actual code of the website can also affect its ranking. It is also recommended to keep the code clean and simple so that crawlers will have an easier time going through the pages.

Keep in mind that crawlers always do not recognize Flash. It’s okay to use it just to spice up the site, but don’t build the entire website with it. This will affect the search engine optimization ranking of the site in a negative way.

Ethics
This is one area where a lot of designers commit mistakes in. It is ideal not to take shortcuts and build the design in an “ethical” manner. Basically what this means is that you shouldn’t use black hat tactics in hopes of increasing the site’s rank faster.

One of the most common black hat tactics is using the same colour for the website background and the link text for link building purposes. Search engines actually see through this façade which results in the site getting blacklisted: meaning they won’t get ranked at all.

Another popular black hat tactic in web design is the use of URL redirects to shove visitors to a particular site or page unwillingly.

Again, these black hat tactics do no good. As a matter of fact, they can even negatively affect search engine optimization ranking rather than increase it.