I grew up at a time when the internet was in its infancy. Websites used to be static with a boring white background and text are written in black font. Search engines turned things around and brought all the information you need at your fingertips. Most importantly, there used to no connection between design and search engine rankings back then.

Today, lines between user experience and user interface design have blurred to an extent where you can not differentiate between the two. The intersection of different domains means that you cannot see everything as a separate entity, but you will have to see the complete picture.

In this article, you will learn about how your web design can influence your search engine rankings.

1. Responsive Design

The days when we only have bulky desktops to access the web are long gone. Today, we use multiple devices to access the web. From a web designer perspective, this means that you will have cater to different screen sizes and device dimensions. That is where responsive web design comes into play. It helps you deliver an immersive web experience irrespective of whether the user is viewing your website on a small screen or large screen.

How does responsive design affect your SEO? Google is penalizing businesses that have a non-responsive website by pushing them down its search rankings. Google has also launched a separate index for mobile, which clearly shows how much emphasis search engines like Google puts on mobile friendliness. With mobile internet users surpassing desktop internet users, having a responsive website is not an option anymore, it has become a necessity. If you don't have a mobile-friendly website, you will be missing out on a huge chunk of customers who are accessing the web through their mobile devices.

2. Page Speed

Designing a website loaded with all visual eye candy might seem pleasing to look at but it will slow down your website page load times. Nobody likes to wait for a website to load irrespective of how beautiful it might look. More importantly, your website page load time can affect how you rank on search engines as it is an important ranking factor search engine consider ranking web pages. Professional web design companies strike a perfect balance between visual appeal and page speed and create web design London that loads quickly and looks good too.

3. Website Structure

Your website layout and structure matters when it comes to search engine rankings. Search engine use crawlers to index web pages and when the crawlers find a complicated website structure, it struggles to crawl pages on your website. That is why it is important to use standard website structure and add a sitemap to make it easy for search engines to crawl your web page. Use a minimalistic and simple design to make life easy for users and search engines.

4. Parallax Design

Parallax design is the latest trend in web design which helps you create a single page website. In addition to this, it uses an innovative menu structure, which makes it easy for users to jump to a different section of your website. On the flip side, the parallax design is not great for mobile devices and SEO.

You might also have to create a different version of your website for different websites, which might require more effort and money. With a single page, you won't be able to interlink different pages, which does not fare better when it comes to your search engine rankings.

5. Website Navigation

Imagine landing on a website that has a confusing navigation. You will have to figure out how you will navigate to different section and pages of your website. Would you spend any more time on it? No, right but how do that impact search engine rankings? When the search engines see that users are not spending more time on the website and bouncing off it, it will increase the bounce rate of your website and will give a message to search engines that your website is not delivering a better user experience, or the information users are looking for.

6. Dynamic Web Pages

Dynamic web pages provide different content for different users based on the operating system and browser they are using. This means that every user gets a different view of your website which adds a touch of personalization to it. Dynamic URLs are not only complicated and have many codes and special characters. Even though search engines might prefer a static URL, but you can make things easier for search engines to crawl dynamic web pages by tweaking your URL and putting in relevant keywords in it.

7. HTML Code

Even the code you write for your website can influence your rankings. The reason is that search engines tend to parse through the HTML code of your website to display your website in search results. If your website does not comply with the W3C standard of HTML code, search engines will either rank you lower or does not rank your website altogether.

Even if there is a slight deviation in the HTML code from W3C standard, search engines will not crawl your web page that is why it is extremely important to comply with the coding standards. As a result, poorly written HTML code can make it impossible for you to rank higher on search engines. It is important for web developers to iron out all these issues during the coding phase so that your website can rank on top of search engines.

Conclusion

Everything from your website navigation, structure, layout, design, page load times and mobile friendliness can all contribute towards improving your search engine rankings. That is why it is important to pay attention to these factors when designing your website. Follow some of the advice mentioned above and create websites that rank higher on search engines.

How do you think your website design can impact SEO? Feel free to share it with us in the comments section below.