Choosing Between Web Design and SEO

As you might have already known, having a good web design will certainly attract a lot of traffic into going to your site. Indeed, a flashy animated intro will surely grab a lot of user attention and will entice them to enter your site. And a lot of videos and interactive content will really get them hooked to your site.

However, as it turns out, while these great attention grabbers will get heads turning into your direction, they can also have a large effect on your SEO efforts. And why do I have to be concerned about that, you might probably ask. As you have already known, the search engines have now become to leading tool for many users. Thus, search engine optimization becomes important in order for you to get to the top of the search engine pages and be the first one that users see.

This is where the elements of your site's design also becomes very crucial. One of these is the ever popular flash animation for your site's intro. While this one do get your viewers' attention after only a few seconds, this does have one catch, it can not be detected by the search engine's spiders. And since this one is located right at your homepage, which can be considered as the gateway to your site, it will certainly spell disaster for your site's ranking, since it is the first thing to be crawled by the spiders.

However, there is still a remedy for this one. By surrounding your flash content with descriptive text, you can actually make your flash elements visible to the search engines. This can either be a simple caption or additional instructions, which will also prove useful to your users. Alternatively, you can provide a site map that search engines can explore instead of your flash home page.

But, of course, there is also a flip side to this concern. While being too flashy can damage your search rankings, obsessing with getting page one rank can also ruin your site. Putting in too much keyword rich content will get your web site's look very muddled. Also, too much optimization can affect the usability of your site for visitor.

The best remedy for this quagmire is, of course, striking a balance between your site's web design and its search engine visibility. Decide and which parts of your site will require more optimization and which ones can be used for flash animation. Also, organize your site's design, such that these two elements integrate into each other. This might take a lot of work, but it will produce a very good site.