It is basically common knowledge at this point that designing a website with the end user in mind helps improve SEO rankings. And yet, the end user experience tends not to be the main focus — only 55% of companies are currently conducting any online user experience testing. The general thought is that all you need is SEO to bring in customers, but what most people don’t realize is that web design and SEO interplay with one another in a big way.
 
Check out this list of popular web design trends, and what web design for SEO means:
 
Parallax Design:
You’ve probably already used a web page that employs some variation of parallax design today, since it tends to make the user experience much easier, and is thought to lead the consumer through a storytelling process on your site.
 
Originally this technique has been employed by game designers, but has recently taken off as a way for web developers to create a different kind of user experience. It creates the illusion of depth on a page by making two or more objects move at different velocities.
 
However, parallax designs often entail one-page sites, which aren’t necessarily great from the SEO perspective. Try to get the best of both worlds by incorporating a few parallax designed pages as part of your website’s experience instead of creating a separate site.
 
Responsive Design
Google itself highly recommends this method, especially when designing a site for multiple devices ( which is very important — four out of five consumers shop on smartphones.)
 
The best thing about responsive web design for SEO is that it does not dilute your link equity. One URL for both your mobile site and your min site means that it will be much easier to increase your external backlink count to each page, instead of working to build links to the two separate URLs.
 
HTML5
HTML5 can create amazing and interactive web designs if coded correctly and well, but can be disadvantageous when it comes to SEO. When the Google spiders crawl over some of these pages, they come up with nothing, which is obviously bad for ratings.
 
The fact is that you have 10 seconds to leave an impression and tell consumers what they’ll get out of your websites and company. After this time (and oftentimes before), they’ll leave, which is why it is very important to maximize your web design for SEO.