Chris Crum explained Matt Cutts video material that responsive design has no influence in your WordPress SEO ranking. That in the end having a responsive design or just a mobile version of site as well will have the same effects on your ranking. Even so, we can not expect to get the best SEO out of our work if the design of our site isn’t clean and logical to all visitors of the pages.
Design part of the WordPress SEO work
The design must reflect the same concept of the site as the written content does. So getting to know your core keywords before elaborating a design is important. Choosing colours might not be influenced by these most of the time but choosing the layout of each page will. As getting to know your site and everything element about it, you will realise the WordPress SEO elements and the aspects specific to your own site.
For example if you are an eCommerce site you’ll need a application to showcase your products. Besides pictures you’ll need to write descriptions as they are important in your WordPress SEO approach. These will determine how the design of that page will work in terms of dimensions of each element.
Easy navigation
One of the most important design aspects of your sites design is how you create your main menu. That will determine the structure of the site and also how easy it is for new unique visitors to access further information. You might have a WordPress SEO strategy in place that gets your site found really fast on SERPs. But if the main menu doesn’t make sense people won’t found more information on the particular aspect they are actually searching on. That will just make them pass to a different site in less than a click.
Now at the same time your sitemap has to make sense to a search engine as well. Google’s spiders are hopefully crawling your website regularly. And they use a semantics to understand how your content actually connects. They analyse the relationship between meaning to define if your WordPress SEO strategy is reflected in the links inside your site. So creating a main menu that is logical for Humans helps you on the design and the search ranking.
Images, the hidden SEO
To create appealing pages for your audience you will always upload images that are connected to your topic. But the images you choose to use will have a WordPress SEO use as well. When opening a site the images used are the things we see but from a Search Engine point these images bring more information. As Squirrly live SEO assistant will not let us forget. When uploading a image we have to include the keyword in the pictures alt tag for better WordPress SEO. But Search Engines cares about how much time it takes for a page to load al well so there a few other aspects that you can do to make sure that the images in your design help in your overall ranking.
To make sure that your images don’t add to your loading time, and you keep the quality, compress them to make the file sizes smaller. The best size is between 30 to 120kb, with a resolution of 72dpi. Put up images that are related to your pages content. With Squirrly you can simply choose one from the ones suggested that are connect to your keyword. Organize all your images in a folder called ‘images’. In the case of WordPress SEO the Media Library takes care of that.
Design, and it’s influence on page rank
So as Chris Crum explained in his article even if responsive design doesn’t have a direct impact on your page rank, you should neglect it. You can choose either types of site for all mobile application but always construct the design with SEO principles in mind. Design, is one aspect of a site that make it user-friendly and help the WordPress SEO over all approach.
Have you integrate the design concept in your SEO strategy ? Are there any elements that might help you in that area ? The comment section awaits for your opinions.
