Posted by randfish

As the worlds of web design and SEO merge ever closer, we’ve been seeing design-specific elements produce a positive impact on SEO for the sites that employ them. It’s terrific news for SEOs who love design and are capable of and passionate about making it part of their repertoire. It’s also great for designers who find that as they evolved from Flash designs to machine-readable CSS and separated markup from content, they’ve earned more links and more organic search love.

In this post, I’ll walk through examples of those design practices in use and describe how they can help improve your opportunity for organic search rankings and traffic.

#1 – Designing that Elicits & Conveys Emotion

A phenomenal article from Aarron Walter of Mailchimp on ThinkVitamin – Emotional Interface Design: The Gateway to Passionate Users – deeply explores the trend of designers using their talents to imprint emotion on users. Personally, I love this practice, and professionally, I see it as incredibly valuable for SEO, too.

Rather than simply providing a user with information, these sites attempt to convey a sense of the companies, products and services they represent in a tangible way.

For McMiller’s Sweets, below, the website expresses the brand’s humor, whimsy and obsession with their product. I only wish I could buy online – there’d be a few boxes headed for the SEOmoz offices right now.

Box.net, an enterprise-focused software company, aims to achieve an air of simplicity and a feeling of the ease that comes from using a basic, consumer application but targeted at a business audience. Their redesign has me convinced – it’s light and airy, it’s up in the clouds (perhaps a double-meaning since they host in “the cloud”) and it even calls out the “sexiness” of the application.

When users are emotionally invested in the websites they visit, they’re more likely to:

• Link
• Share
• Contribute Content
• Participate
• Remain Loyal
• Invest in the Experience
• Browse more Pages

All of these have either first or second-order impacts on SEO in a positive way.

#2 – The Scroll-Triggered Call-to-Action

Sometimes, you don’t want to overwhelm content with calls-to-action… At least, not until you’re fairly certain your visitor has finished reading. That’s where the brilliance of the scroll-triggered call-to-action comes in.

Browse any article on the New York Times website and you’ll see this behavior in action, driving you to read the next article in the series only after you’ve reached the bottom of the current piece:

It’s great for boosting page views, but also drives more awareness of those pieces, improving links and driving up visibility for previously less-well-publicized works. My guess is that clicks are quite high.

In the next example, the OKCupid Blog leverages precisely the same tactic:

This use case might be even more brilliant. After wrapping up a remarkable article about what statistics tell us not to do in online dating, my first instinct is to share the piece with some single friends. OKCupid’s flawlessly timed, dropdown overlay synchs with this internal compulsion and makes it easy to tweet, like, stumble or buzz away.

Scrolling + triggers = more browsing, more awareness and more sharing (and I think the potential applications for SEO are far greater in quantity than just what’s been shared above).

#3 – User Badges

If your users are passionate about your site and their experience or participation, why not make it easy to share?

For years, sites have been offering users the virtual incentives of points, badges and status to encourage greater participation. Andrew Follet from Concept Feedback authored a brilliant piece analyzing this precise behavior and exposing some terrific examples.

We’ve noticed an interesting behavior as it relates to user badges as well, and it’s spurred me to whiteboard the following chart numerous times for those who have online communities considering SEO:

The lesson? Make great communities, encourage participation and reward your users with badges that will make their sites look good. It’s the online equivalent of giving out high quality, well designed t-shirts – fans won’t just wear them to bed; they’ll actually show off your brand.

#4 – The Animated HTML Multiheader

I wrote about the multiheader a long time ago, and the evolution of design has made them tremendously more compelling and useful since then. Case-in-point, Unbounce, who has 5 different messages/features on their homepage all accessible to engines and all part of a single multiheader. I’ve screencaptured them elegantly “swooshing” in and out of the headline position:

The advantage is two-fold – more content on the homepage that’s accessible to search engines (thanks to clever CSS/HTML usage) and everyone who links to any one version is concentrating the link juice singularly on the home page. In some cases, that could cause problems, but in others, it’s a great opportunity to leverage design to focus the links you acquire where you need them most.

BTW – Speaking of Unbounce, If you have yet to read Oli Gardner’s 12-Step Landing Page Rehab Program, you’re seriously missing out.

#5 – Sexy, Embeddable Infographics

Infographic linkbait is certainly all the rage these days, and I think it’s a well-justified trend. The brilliant part is that you benefit by producing the infographic and other bloggers benefit by sharing it and attracting views, attention and links of their own. So long as the embed works seemlessly and the infographic is compelling, you’re off to the link acquisition races.

Some examples I enjoyed came from Smashing Magazine, who put together this piece on programming (and the how-to behind it’s creation):

And this smart contribution from Visual Economics:

As with badges, the “beauty rule” applies – the sexier your infographic (and the most interesting/useful/compelling the content), the higher adoption will be.

#6 – Designing Around Illustration (with CSS)

It used to be that I’d see a website built around illustrations and artistry and shake my head in sadness, knowing that the beauty of the UI was unlikely to be experienced by anyone except those coming via type-in. Today, with the amazing progress of CSS, sites like Carbon Made can have their design cake and eat their SEO, too.

Google’s “text only” cache shows every word you can see in the screenshot – we’ve come a long way indeed. And, darn it if that design doesn’t make me want to just climb a mountain and jump off a cliff into an octopus-filled lake below… errr.. make an online portfolio (yeah, that’s the one!)

For another look, check out Ruby on Rails developers, Pioneers:

Pretty, accessible and indexable, what more could an SEO ask?

#7 – Creative Content Formats Unleashed

Sometimes, you visit a site that stands out from everything else you’ve seen on the web in the past. Historically, many of those sites have also been tragically obscured from search engines. Nowadays, a new breed is emerging, showing off massive creativity, brilliance in design innovation and a compelling combination of link-worthiness and search-accessibility.

A few of my favorite recent stumbles into this realm include:

Above: Grain and Gram Gentleman’s Journal

Above: Sanctuary T Shop (who knew a small e-commerce shop could be this pretty?)

Above: Heart Directed (a great place to find more remarkable creative formats, though lacking the machine readable content to be an SEO example itself)

p.s. If design inspires you, I’d recommend checking out Drawar and Six Revisions list of 10 Fresh Galleries for Inspiration

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Read other posts by this Author: randfish

It is said that having a good foundation is fundamental to having a strong building to last for years to come. The same goes when it comes to developing your website. Before you start plans on how to market your site, it always pays dividend to take a step back and review the website to ensure that its fundamentals are right.

Here’s three items on the list of checklist to ensure that your site is able to capture users for long term benefits. The three simple ways to dramatically improve your website are as follows:

Mental Note 1 – Get them Hooked

The internet has changed since the old days back in 2004, there are a lot of things happening on screen that distracts your users’ attention. Browsers with multiple tabs also then to fight for attention, apart from this you still have real world distractions to compete with like answering phone calls, etc. Before long your user forgets what they have been reading or the site they were visiting. I bet this happens too many of us.

Provide tools to allow visitors to bookmark your article or site easily. The best place is to have it position near the top of the article. Also note that you should only display 3 bookmark links and an option to select others so as to not let the bookmarking tool snatch attention away from the page content. You can try out tools like addthis helps websites add a simple bookmarking tool

Mental Note 2 – Show the Visitor What They Want

You manage to attract visitors to your site and they feel complied to click through to your inner pages. Your site is content rich, however they can’t find the content that they are looking for. This isn’t good as it is commonly known when you present users with too much choice they tend not to make any decisions.

So to tackle this, make sure your site layout and content structure is properly sorted out. You would need to have clear navigation menus or breadcrumbs to allow users to navigate across the entire site. Having a HTML sitemap is also an essential item as this provides visitors with a bird’s eye view of your site structure.

Mental Note 3 – Use Nice Smoothing Colours

Ever been to a site that turns you offer visually upon arrival? In the past, there were many badly made websites. This has since changed, however there are still some design mistakes made by designers or site owners that do turn off users visually.

As a rule of thumb, always use web safe colours like white background, with dark font colours. Make sure the font size is also within an acceptable height and width. I normally use 11 pixel points for most of my sites. That’s the font size that works best for me. However do ask your readers if that’s the best size for them.

Do you have another mental note on how to dramatically improve your website’s performance, why not share a tip or so here – Drop a comment or contact me

3. Don’t Make Your Visitors Have To Write An Email To Contact You

If you are inviting enquiries or contact from visitors to your website you need to provide them with a way of doing this that is as easy as possible for them. Just posting your email address on the website is not the best solution. Why? Because when they click on it they need to then create an email from scratch. Do you know how busy your visitors are? They hardly have time to read the content of your homepage – never mind create an email from scratch. The solution? You need to use a simple form. A form enables you to standardise the responses that you receive and it also makes it very simple for your visitors to get in touch with you – all they need to do is pop in their name, email address and tick a few boxes and that’s it.

Making it easy for your visitors to contact you isn’t the only reason that using a form is a great idea. Doing so means you can get some information back from each person that fills in the form. You can ask them how they discovered your website, which other websites they like to visit – you can ask them anything! Anything that is going to help you learn more about them, more about who they are and more about what will make them buy from you. You think they would tell you all this if they were creating an email from scratch? No – of course they wouldn’t! That’s why you need a form.Similar Posts:

• SEO Traffic Vs Blogging Traffic Generation for Website
• Free Email Marketing Website
• 15 Video SEO Tips for Video Search Optimization
• Simple steps to increase page views on your blog
• 15 effective ways to make your blog comments more noticeable

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Read other posts by this Author: Frank

1. Describe your business.
2. Who are your customers?
3. What are your products and services?
4. What are your objectives and expectations?
5. Is the material and content, for instance, images, logos & text, already available?
6. Are you able to write your own content?
7. How often would your website need updating, for instance, product launches, promotions, news updates etc
8. What is the launch date for your website?
9. What websites do you admire?
10. What would you like your visitors to think about your website?
11. What action would you like your visitors to take?
12. Have you already registered your domain names?
13. Who would be responsible for maintaining your website?