Do Search Engines Care About Web Design?

This is a really interesting question: do the search engines like Google, Yahoo and the others care about web design? To better understand this, we start from the beginning. It is important to understand what the search engines are and what their role. Google for example is a huge network of computers in various locations called data centres. There are objective is to visit as many websites as possible and store the text data that they come across so these information can be used to power the search results.

The main role of search engine like Google is to provide web surfers with the most useful and relevant results on the listings for keywords they type in the search box. For example if a user type “web design” in google.co.uk, Google would like to provide the user with the most appropriate results relating to the keyword “web design”.

Search engines robots or ‘bots' are specially designed software programs used by search engines to per form the search results. These bots follow links they find on web pages and extract the text content they come across and this process goes on. During this process, at no point Google or any other search engines admire the design of the web pages or company logo designed by your web designer. Google only spider the page, take out the text version and move to a next page. Imagine the number of web pages on the internet. Search engines don't have the capacity to stop and think if a web site is beautiful or what.

You are not convinced with the above. Let us consider something else. All web pages are made up of HTML codes. HTML is used to structure texts and images on a page. Now try something by yourself. On you browser, select View, Source from the toolbar menu. The codes you see represent the HTML version of your website. And this is where your optimisation should go so you can get a good ranking on Google or any other search engine.

The conclusion we can take out from the above is to build content rich website and search engines will like. Content is considered to be king. If search engines are not provided with unique and valuable contents, your web sire runs the risk to die. Having a good looking web design is a nice idea as this gives a professional look. However content should be given high priority as content is food for search engines.