Search engine optimisation and marketing consist in delivering targeted traffic to your website via search engines. Search engines deliver more than half of the web's traffic. But good performance in search engines is not enough. Your site could rank on #1 for a broad range of keywords. Unless your website manages to keep the interest of users alive and convert visits into sales, then all the effort and investment is in vain.
The design and structure of your website are key factors in search engine optimisation. A properly designed site that complies with current web standards is similar to a nice birthday cake. The traffic coming from search engines is the icing and the cherry on top. They make the web presence a sweet and savoury affair. And it's not just the pretty pictures that are important but all essential elements: navigation, text, readability etc.
Search engine spiders are robots, they don't have a notion of beautiful or ugly, well designed or badly designed. They analyse what a web site has and what hasn't. Good website design for search engines is not so much a creative process, it's more an analytical one. Search engines look for the following in a site:
So you see, website design is more than just design, it's building an informational unit that is functional, appealing and is search engine marketing oriented. Your web site must turn visitors into customers, bear that in mind when you hire a company (a design company or a SEO) to build your site.
Accessibility as Part of The SEM Strategy