Will the visual design of your pages help your SEO?

• Search keywords are market segments
• What about the Risk of Social Media?
• Does a CMS help your SEO?
• Do Your SEO Tactics Work for Everyone?

This is an important aspect to consider for a number of reasons.

An attractive website design will ensure a higher CTR initially but is also crucial in whether or not people stay on the website for any amount of time - or press the dreaded back button.

Thanks for the info, I guess I'm one of the first to read your post and lucky enough to find out about this. Honestly, I don't concentrate too much on the visual design and now that you've mentioned it, I may have to look at some of my websites.

Thanks Mike!

We'd all be naive to think that we do not judge a book by its cover. The fact is, the medium is the message. You can drive traffic with SEO/SEM and if people aren't satisfied with what they land on, they'll bounce. SEO/SEM might capture the traffic but it's design and content that gets the conversion.

As I've said many times before, I wish I had a ten spot for every time a prospect said, "I just need some SEO". But of course not realizing their baby actually is ugly, or at least needs a makeover.

Excellent information in as much as it further chips away at the artificial, and sometimes detrimental, line between attracting visitors (SEO) and converting visitors (CO).

I wouldn't agree completely with you on "Up until now, the appearance of your Web pages had nothing to do with your success in organic search"

I think that look of our website influences the number of natural backlinks (other people linking you) you earn and this in turn affects SERP ranking as we all know.

I hadn't thought about that angle, Arun. That's a very good point and I am so glad you added it here.

I think SEO and good web design need to go hand in hand. Like Mark stated, a good design will generally lead to a better conversion rate, but if Google go ahead with the preview feature its also going to be a major factor in users clicking from the SERPs to sites.

Interesting I'd noticed Google had been playing with site previews - I can't see much point in it myself, it takes longer to wait for the popup than it does to click and actually visit the site!

That might be true during the test, Dom, but don't expect it to stay that way if Google goes ahead and implements it for real. If they can implement Google Instant to do full searches with each keystroke you better believe that they can pop-up a thumbnail image in speedy fashion.

SEO and how pages look should really go hand in hand, you can have a page optimised to the max but if the design turns people away, it drags the whole procces down massively, same works for the other way around. You go the page to find a relevant information and doesnt matter how brilliant the design of it is, if it doesnt have what you need.