Design Vs SEO, Can’t We All Just Get Along?

IN THIS CORNER, designing with Flash animations, using cool fonts (or anything other than boring old arial), and of course lots of lovely white space, we have THE DESIGNER!

IN THE OTHER CORNER with a mission to sell sell sell, a need for ROI, and a primal fear of wasted real estate on a web page, we have THE SEO MARKETER!

In this never ending war for design control of the client’s web site, battles are fought every day over aesthetics vs. sales; brand vs. search rankings. But, it doesn’t have to be that way. Can’t we all just get along? Yes we can.

As painful as it is to admit, the days of not having to worry about SEO unless you’re working on an online retailer site have passed. The reality now is that any brand’s importance is perceived to be in direct correlation to where they rank on Goolge. Ask yourself, how often do you even go to the second page on Google when doing a search? The fact is, conversion numbers plummet for each page your site drops on the search engines. So the challenge now is that designers have a new set of restrictions to work under, and really, we should be used to working under certain restraints, that’s what we do. Every design assignment is fraut with restrictions, (style guides, budget constraints and client preferences) so think of SEO restrictions as an opportunity to be that much more creative.

A few design guidelines to make sure your site is ready for SEO
1. Standard fonts only. Your navigation, content areas, calls to action and special offers are all opportunities to ad search terms so be creative with placement proportion and color, but use the standard fonts.

2. live text in all areas with searchable content. Don’t cheat by using non-standard fonts and make them images! Search engines can’t read it unless it’s live.

3. Flash or no Flash: the days of 30 second Flash introductions are long over. Use Flash to bring attention to certain areas on the page but make sure it doesn’t interfere with down load times and doesn’t include key words that need to be searchable.

4. call to action: There should be a strong call-to-action on each page of the site, no one should have to scroll to the bottom of the page to find your phone number.

5. Share share share: each page should have a bookmark button that allows visitors to share your site on Del.ico.us, Digg, Facebook, Stumbleupon, Twitter etc. etc.